A recent film that does a
superlative job of recreating the atmosphere of the 1960s is Julie Taymore’s audacious experiment in musical romantic drama, Across the Universe (2007). Her plot and
characters, well acted and sung by Evan Rachel Wood
and Jim Sturges, among others, are ingeniously
created from lyrics of numerous songs by The Beatles. Set against the Vietnam
War and student unrest going on when the music was composed, the songs actually
seem written for the film instead of the other way around.

An excellent Blu
Ray release to show off picture and audio quality, it’s a must-have for any fan
of the Beatles’ music or for anyone interested in the decade of the 1960s, and
comes across as a sort of alternately realistic and heavily stylized rock
opera. The disc includes a director’s commentary and a nice selection of
behind-the-scenes featurettes, plus some of the
artwork created for the film, all in high-definition.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE on BluRay:

Movie A+ / Video A+ /
Audio A+ / Extras A-

BARAKA (1992)

In fall of 2008, the experimental
documentary Baraka (1992), carefully
restored from its original 65mm film negative with an extra-high-definition
transfer, came out in a BluRay edition. The film
itself is a mesmerizing, nonlinear and non-narrative journey around the world,
presenting a vivid slice of life across numerous cultures and geographic
landscapes. Only the BluRay format on a large full-HD
screen can do justice to the film, unless you happen to have a 70mm film
projector in your house.

This disc can serve as a
demonstration for the format’s image sharpness and audio clarity. Even BluRay can’t reproduce all the detail in a 70mm film print,
but this disc shows just how impressive it can be. Baraka’s sound is recorded in a 96-kHz uncompressed digital track
with higher audio standards than most home stereo systems can reproduce (more
than double the range of a CD). Extras are modest but interesting, including a
behind-the-scenes documentary that runs over an hour and a 7-minute featurette on the film’s restoration.

BARAKA on BluRay

Movie: AVideo: A+Audio: A+Extras: C

BECKET (1964)

Richard Burton has the title role opposite Peter O'Toole as King Henry II
in Peter Glenvile's effective and Oscar-winning (for
Edward Anhalt's script) version of Jean Anouilh's
play, produced by veteran Hal Wallis. The two-and-a-half-hour length never
seems long, thanks to the script and the performances. The plot is about two
close friends who become estranged after the king appoints Thomas Becket
Archbishop of Canterbury and Becket takes the new position seriously. It's
truly an actor's film, full of great lines delivered well, with Burton and
O'Toole both nominated for Best Actor and John Gielgud getting a Supporting
Actor nomination as King Louis of France. While some have complained that
O'Toole chews the scenery throughout, his performance is an acting choice that
fit the character quite well -- a king who is always "on stage" in
front of his subjects. When he's alone with Becket, he is much more subdued, as
Burton is throughout in comparison. Geoffrey Unsworth's
beautiful Panavision cinematography and Anne Coates' effective editing both
earned Oscar nominations (the film had 12 in all, but won only for Adapted
Screenplay). The story's basic theme of separation of church and state seems
unexpectedly timely in today's world political climate, but its story of a
friendship destroyed by political and philosophical differences is timeless.

The film's recent restoration by the Motion Picture Academy looks very
nice, with rich, stable colors and no visible wear, but the unfortunately HD
transfer for the MPI Blu-ray is rather soft, with film grain highly reduced if
not completely erased, similar to the Blu-ray editions of Spartacus and The Thomas Crown
Affair. It looks marginally sharper than a good standard DVD, but does not
reveal the detail and textures that a Blu-ray is capable of (as in such earlier
films as Quo Vadis, An American In Paris,
The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, The General, Gone With The Wind, or The Mikado, to name just a few). The
stereo soundtrack is Dolby Digital rather than lossless, but still sounds very
good. There are some nice, though not extensive extras, all
standard-definition, including 2007 interviews with editor Anne Coates and
composer Laurence Rosenthal, a 4-minute trailer and 30-second TV spot, plus a
47-image high-definition image gallery of stills, lobby cards, pressbooks, and posters. There's also a fairly interesting
audio commentary with Peter O'Toole.

BECKET on Blu-ray

Movie:
A- / Video: B+ / Audio: A / Extras: B+

THE BIBLE (1966)

John Huston's motion picturization of major stories from the Book of Genesis is
attractive to look at (thanks to Giuseppe Rotunno's
fine 65mm widescreen cinematography), but its episodic, sometimes tedious
pageant-like nature (narrated by Huston) takes a toll on dramatic cohesiveness
and viewer involvement in the characters, particulary
on the first half. Still, Huston is entertaining as Noah, and the logistics
needed to film the ark and the flood sequence remain impressive. After the
intermission (about an hour and 26 minutes into it) and a brief episode of the
Tower of Babel, the film suddenly comes to life with the intertwined stories of
Abram/Abraham and Lot, starring George C. Scott as Abraham. This much longer
(about 80 min. on its own) and more dramatically interesting segment redeems
the overall film, thanks largely to its more traditional plot structure but
just as much to Scott's strong screen presence and a nice performance by Ava
Gardner as his wife.

Sound quality is very good, but on
a big screen the picture quality is a bit disappointing, especially for a film
shot in 65mm. It looks better than a DVD (and looks fine on a small 720p TV
set), but some softening of film grain, especially in the first half, removes
the crispness from all the textures that should spring off the screen in any
film print or a superior Blu-ray transfer projected on a large screen (as they
do in Fox's South Pacific and 1951
version of The Day the Earth Stood StillBlu-rays. The only bonus feature on this disc
(besides a menu and chapter stops) is a standard-definition trailer for the
film, encoded so that older players display it as a tiny picture in the upper
left corner of the screen (an increasingly common anomaly on many recent Blu-rays).

THE BIBLE on Blu-ray

Movie: B- / Video: A- / Audio: A / Extras: D-

THE BIG COUNTRY (1958)

Certain movies received
widespread critical acclaim when they were first released, but later
reappraisals in video guides are much less enthusiastic if not downright
dismissive of the same films. After watching them on TV for oneself, it can be
easy to wonder why the film’s reputation was once so positive. How could
critics and audiences have been so overwhelming in their praise for something
that now seems relatively tedious, only a few years or perhaps a generation or
two later? Have moviegoers’ tastes and standards shifted that drastically in
such a short time? Did an otherwise outstanding director just happen suddenly
to use bad judgment throughout one production?

Of course great directors do
sometimes have duds from time to time, and audience tastes do change to some
degree. But a large part of a film’s success depends on its presentation in the
form it was originally intended, and Hollywood movies are created with the
assumption that they will be projected onto a large theatre screen, usually
with a good-sized audience. Later reviews and viewer reactions, based solely
upon watching television broadcasts or home video versions on VHS or DVD,
simply cannot evaluate the film that the director expected the audience to see.

While the practice of
“letterboxing” can at least allow different image formats to fit within a TV set’s
fixed picture shape, the small size and low image quality of
standard-definition TVs mean that without frequent close-ups, viewers cannot
see actors’ facial expressions that would be clearly visible on a theatre
screen running the original film. This explains why so many TV shows rely on
numerous close-ups and medium-shots, whereas films made for theatres have many
more long shots and extreme long shots, especially films made in the first few
decades of widescreen – the 1950s through 1970s.

The Academy-Award-winning The Big Country (1958) is a perfect
example. The recent Motion Picture Academy restoration of William Wyler and
Gregory Peck's independent production was released on a bargain Blu-ray from
Fox/MGM in 2011 that finally permits the film’s reputation to be
re-established. On Blu-ray and a very large full-HD screen, it no longer seems
to be a few memorable scenes buried within an overlong and clunky chronicle,
but instead becomes an engrossing panorama of people and place.

Peck stars as a retired sea
captain in the late 19th century who travels west to marry the daughter
(Carroll Baker) of a wealthy and powerful ranch owner (Charles Bickford) who
has been feuding for years with a neighboring rancher (Burl Ives) he despises
for the family's rough, "trashy" lifestyle. Charlton Heston plays Bickford's no-nonsense foreman and Chuck Conners is Ives' crudely violent son, while Jean Simmons is
a schoolteacher who just happens to own the ranch in the middle that supplies
water to the two feuding families.

Of course personalities clash,
romances ebb and flow, secrets come to light, and tensions all around gradually
build to an exciting climax over the course of this sprawling 165-minute epic.
Basically a story of the conflict that results when a strong but deliberate man
of peace suddenly finds himself in a culture of
knee-jerk violence, it's a western action film for people who prefer character
dramas and a character drama for people who prefer western action. Peck's
character in some ways calls to mind his role in The Gunfighter, and the western setting can easily be seen as an
allegory about today’s times.

There are times when the pacing
might be tightened, but those parts are more likely to seem objectionably slow
when the film is viewed on a standard TV set. The Big Country is definitely a film designed for the big screen,
and while the strong characterizations and fine performances (Ives won the
Oscar for Supporting Actor) make for a compelling story, much of its impact
comes from the vastness of the rural western environment that can only be
appreciated with a picture as large and detailed as possible. Longer takes
(with resultant slower pacing) and close attention are required to notice the
richness of details crammed into the many long distance shots. Without
recognizing those details, an evaluation of the movie’s effectiveness might
easily drop one or two letter grades or from, say, 8 or 9 out of 10 to 5 or 6
out of 10.

The Big Country was filmed in Technirama,
a high-resolution horizontal 35mm format comparable to VistaVision but using
the 2.35:1 "scope" aspect ratio, with a picture area double the size
of standard film so it will look good on extra-large screens. The excellent
high-definition transfer on the new Blu-ray restores the details and textures
that could never be seen on TV. On a large 1080p screen viewed from less than
two screen-widths away, this makes the many long shots and wide-angle views
dramatic and involving rather than distancing and dull. The opening credits
with their optical work seem a bit soft compared with the rest of the
crystal-clear transfer, which would deserve an A+ rather than an A if not for
some periodic but pervasive faint color flickering that may be due to original
lab work or slight deterioration of the negative over the years.

Oddly for such a big production,
the film has only mono sound. It would have been nice if separate magnetic
dialogue / effects / music masters or at least original multi-track recordings
of Jerome Moross' impressive Oscar-nominated score
had survived. Nevertheless, the sound is certainly adequate, with the Blu-ray's
DTS-HD Master Audio presenting decent but not outstanding frequency range.

Bonus features are sparse, but
hard to complain about on a bargain $10 Blu-ray. There's the original trailer
in HD, a standard-definition black-and-white TV promo for the ABC Sunday Night
Movie presentation, and a peculiar but quaintly fun short promotional film
(also black-and-white and standard-definition) with Jean Simmons describing how
the cast and crew play cards and chess with each other between scenes. There
are also five alternate language dubbed soundtracks and optional subtitles in
ten languages. As usual for recent MGM/Fox Blu-rays,
there is unfortunately no main menu, so all features can only be accessed
through a pop-up menu.

THE BIG COUNTRY on Blu-ray:

Movie: A / Video: A /
Audio: A- / Extras: D

BLACK NARCISSUS (1947)

Black Narcissus is an odd but reasonably compelling melodrama that
is aided immensely by the outstanding Technicolor cinematography of Jack
Cardiff and its lush settings that reproduce a castle in the Himalayas and the
surrounding landscape of India.

The plot deals with the emotional
and personal conflicts of a small group of Anglican missionary nuns assigned to
set up a school and hospital in a remote mountain village. The completely
foreign atmosphere, the fact that their new convent was formerly used to house
the local sultan’s harem, and the handsome but worldly local British official,
only serve to heighten the sisters’ isolation and loneliness, and eventually
take a toll on their sense of discipline as they start to recollect their lives
before joining the order.

Deborah Kerr is very good as the
superior Sister Clodagh, with strong support from
Kathleen Byron as her chief adversary, Sister Ruth, and David Farrar as the
cynical Mr. Dean. Indian star Sabu is fine as a
general’s son who falls for the charms of exotic and sensual beggar girl Jean
Simmons.

The region-free ITV disc and the
“Region A” Criterion disc both have the uncut 100-minute British release of the
film. By the end of 1947, several minutes were deleted from the American
release due to censorship concerns about the image of religious life it
presented. The BluRay shows off the Oscar-winning
cinematography and art direction with a magnificent film-like hi-def transfer that brings out the luxuriant colors and
textures of everything in the scene and preserves the fine grain of the film.
Other than one or two brief color fluctuations, it looks like it could have
been shot and released this year. The audio is good for its age, and may
benefit from boosting the bass slightly during playback.

The only extras on the ITV BluRay from Britain are a lovely hi-def
transfer of the film’s original British trailer (which plays fine on American BluRay players), plus a brief documentary about the film
that is unfortunately in the standard-definition PAL format, and thus may show
a distorted image, audio with no image, or nothing at all on some American
Blu-ray players. A virtually identical-looking American BluRay
release of Black Narcissus is
available from Criterion with additional extras, all in the NTSC format.

2009 was a notable year for BluRay technology -- its adoption by consumers, its
decreasing prices, and especially for its greatly expanded selection of titles
available. Unfortunately there are a substantial number of interesting films
released to BluRay that are not for sale in North
America, but can be found in Europe. Many are region-locked and need a special
player to view them, but quite a few are region-free, including some American
classics released by the British Eureka video label. Especially notable recent
releases are F. W. Murnau’s all-time classic Sunrise (1927), the only film ever to
win an Oscar for “artistic quality of production,” and the sometimes campy
medieval family adventure, The Black
Shield of Falworth (1954), Universal Pictures’
very first film in the new CinemaScope widescreen format. These can easily be
ordered on line through Amazon.co.uk (and anyone with an existing Amazon
account does not need to open a new account to order from England). Orders
typically arrive within a week of shipping, often faster than U.S. orders.

A few days before Christmas, I
had a couple of people over to watch The
Black Shield of Falworth (1954) on the new Eureka
BluRay (preceded by a standard DVD of a Universal “cartune,” Convict
Concerto, a well-above-average Woody Woodpecker title released to theatres
a couple of months after the feature). We all found both the short and feature
quite entertaining. My guests were amazed at the clarity of the 8-foot-wide
CinemaScope picture, commenting that the textures were so vivid it was
"like you could reach out and pet the horses!"

The opening titles are a little
soft in the center but the rest of the film is consistently crisp, except for
the few seconds before and after any optical transition like a dissolve or fade
(a property of the duping process used for transitions by almost all films of
that era). Colors are very strong, not quite as rich as 1940s Technicolor, but
still well-saturated, especially the night scenes. Unfortunately Universal did
not use the original 4-track magnetic stereo soundtrack, but the optical mono
track used for the BluRay is very good quality and
was likely heard in many theatres.

Rudolph Maté’sThe Black Shield of Falworth
is a classic example of a major studio period adventure movie that seems aimed
primarily at the Saturday-matinee audience of 1950s kids (especially boys about
8-12), with enough tongue-in-cheek dialogue, action-intrigue, and production
values to appeal to adult viewers and win broad family audiences. Rather
harshly treated by many serious critics of the era and afterwards, the film has
remained largely underrated except by a core of fans of medieval swashbucklers,
and oddly never got an official DVD release in the U.S. Amazon is still selling
old VHS copies of the “fullscreen” version at prices
from $30-$50, yet the brand new BluRay from
Amazon.co.uk was only $16 plus shipping!

The young Tony Curtis takes a
while to warm up in the role but does just fine for the most part as a late
teen/early 20-something boy raised as a peasant, who trains to be a knight and
learns he's really the son of a knight who had been unjustly condemned for
treason so a rival could seize his property. All of this is going on during the
reign of Henry IV (Ian Keith), with a major subplot of that same villain's plot
to get rid of the apparently dissolute future Henry V (Dan O'Herlihy)
and seize the throne. Meanwhile, of course, impetuous Tony meets and falls for
Janet Leigh, daughter of his noble patron Herbert Marshall. A very pretty
Barbara Rush plays Curtis' sister.

It may actually be the script and
direction as much as Curtis's acting that take a while to get going (or at
least for the audience to become accustomed to). The first half-hour or so of
the film, with the right crowd of people, could easily be viewed as high camp
of "Rocky Horror" proportions, just begging for audience members to
talk back to the characters or recite lines in unison. It's hard to believe the
screenwriter didn't know how laughable some of the early dialogue exchanges
were and may well have done it intentionally to entertain parents who may have
accompanied their kids (who would take everything seriously).

Once Curtis gets into his
military training, however, the plotting becomes more involved, the acting
improves, the film picks up in pace considerably, and it remains highly
enjoyable despite the predictable melodrama through its conclusion. Torin Thatcher is great as the crusty one-eyed Sir James,
Curtis' medieval drill-sergeant. It's no Adventures
of Robin Hood by any means, but it's all a lot of good clean Hollywood fun
from the days before bloody decapitations became the norm for historical action
films.

The Black Shield of Falworth is also very
nice to look at for its effective use of the full width of its CinemaScope
frame in almost every single shot. It may be way too overlit
in all of the interior shots (the standard Hollywood style of the 50s and 60s),
but it's always meticulously composed on the screen. The art direction is quite
respectable, and much more noticeable in high
definition (and some of the decorative little pennants on the horses certainly
look like they're made of plastic!).

The BluRay
looks and sounds very impressive, despite no "restoration" being apparent.
The original print had been kept in pristine condition. Unfortunately they did
not use the original stereo soundtrack for whatever reason, so the sound is
mono only, and there are also absolutely no extra features on the disc, unless
you consider chapter stops as a bonus. The copyright warning, unlike the
ominous red-background US text screens, is simple white letters on black and
its wording is quaintly civil, entreating viewers not to copy the film if they
value having more movies like this being made available.

THE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH on BluRay:

Movie: B / Video: A+ /
Audio: A- / Extras: F+

BODY AND SOUL (1947)104m****

Robert Rossen’s noirish portrait of a small-time fighter who works
his way up to champion and becomes addicted to success is one of the best films
about boxing to come out of Hollywood. It’s really a modern-day variation on
the Faust story. Abraham Polonsky’s Oscar-nominated
script creates a vivid character study of a man so desperate for fame and
fortune as he literally fights his way to become champion, that he gets to the
point where to stay on top he’s willing to sell out (to the mob rather than the
Devil, in this case). The temptation to betray his personal values and
relationships with his girlfriend, mother, manager, and friends, becomes
irresistible. But ever the tragically flawed hero, he remains tormented about
whether he should go through with it, leading to a suspenseful climactic boxing
match. Told largely in flashback, the passage of time is not dwelt upon, but is
obviously a decade or more and adds something of an epic feeling to the story
as the characters age and their situations change, while the boxing syndicate
goes on as it always has.

Similar themes in
Polonsky’s self-directed script Force of Evil (also on a beautiful-looking Blu-ray from Olive) are
far more preachy and heavy-handed. All of the actors in Body and Soul are outstanding, especially John Garfield’s
Oscar-nominated performance in the lead, and fine supporting turns by William
Conrad, Lilli Palmer, and the rest of the cast. Equally impressive is the stark
black-and-white cinematography by the masterful James Wong Howe and the Academy
Award-winning editing. The fight scenes are most notable, and appear to be an
obvious influence on Martin Scorsese’s Raging
Bull.Body and Soul belongs on any
list of the greatest boxing films, up there with Golden Boy, The Set-Up, Rocky, and Raging Bull (the latter two of which are also available on
outstanding Blu-rays). This independent production was
originally released through United Artists and is now part of the Republic
Pictures collection owned by Paramount and licensed by Olive Films.

The HD transfer
on Olive’s Blu-ray is simply stunning, with deep blacks and whites and a wide
contrast range that brings out all the textures and details, looking like a
mint 35mm print. The sound quality is fine, in lossless two-channel mono that
sounds best mixed down to the center speaker and a subwoofer. As is typical for
Olive releases, there are no extras except for a main menu and a chapter menu.

BODY AND SOUL on Blu-ray --

Movie: A/Video:
A+/Audio: A/Extras: F

BUGSY MALONE (1976)

Better known for Midnight Express, Fame, Mississippi Burning,
and others, director Alan Parker came up with an audaciously clever concept for
his first theatrical feature -- a musical gangster film set in the 1920s
starring kids in all the roles. It now seems to be a cult favorite in Britain
but almost unknown in the U.S. I recall Bugsy
Malone (1976) having played here theatrically but missed it during its
short run. I remember seeing it on HBO in the late 70s and I think it was on
VHS but never made it to DVD, let alone BluRay on
this side of the Atlantic.

Besides the fact
that neither the 1920s nor musicals have been in vogue for some time, the
film's biggest obstacle for most viewers is likely that the entire cast is
between the ages of about 10 and 15 (including a young Scott Baio and Jodie Foster)! Stealing the show, however, is FlorrieDugger as "Blousey." The dancers are all impressively
self-assured and professional, especially considering their ages, but all the
singing appears to be lip-synched to somewhat older voices (including
songwriter Paul Williams himself, and what sounds very much like Bernadette
Peters, among others).

Paul Williams
contributed a fun, bouncy score that is reminiscent of the 1920s with a 1970s
Broadway flavor, and fits the quirky concept perfectly. It's all an
affectionate tribute to classic Hollywood as a kid might imagine himself or
herself showing up in a formula gangster film. What makes the film work is that
the director and cast play everything straight, rather than camping it up.

A few odd choices
threaten to push it into farce, such as the pedal-cars and especially the
whipped-cream gun blasts, but once one can accept them as a kid-friendly and
non-bloody convention, they actually work in the context. The only exception is
some apparent changing of the "rules" during the final free-for-all,
but what would Hollywood be without a happy ending? Overall the movie is a lot
of fun for any movie buff and fan of classic musicals.

The picture looks
very good indeed in high-definition, its 1.78 image half-way between the 1.66
that would have been seen in Europe and the 1.85 that was seen in the U.S. The
5.1 stereo soundtrack is also very nice. This disc is
region-free so its high-definition content (the feature film) plays with no
problem on Region ABluRay
players. There is a very good director's commentary track as a bonus feature.
Unfortunately the other bonus features are not merely standard definition but
are all in the PAL format, so many American BluRay
players will either not play them at all, may display a distorted picture, or
may play only the audio.

The 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, starring Alastair Sim
as Scrooge (Scrooge was the film’s
original title when it was released in England), belongs on the shelf of every
home video library. The new BluRay edition from VCI
entertainment also includes a regular DVD of the film in the package, making it
perfect for people not quite ready to switch to HD or for those who might want
to use the standard DVD for their kids or in their car DVD players.

This British production of Dickens’
classic novel is one of the best of the numerous versions produced over the
decades. It is very well-mounted, beautifully photographed, and wonderfully
acted by a distinguished cast of character actors, including Michael Hordern and a very young Patrick MacNee.
It’s one of the few versions that is able to go beyond
the standard and predictable dramatization of the familiar story to achieve
moments that remain truly moving after multiple viewings.

VCI’s BluRay
transfer is visually magnificent, restored from the original 35mm film negative
and a finegrain print, reproducing the rich contrast
of inky blacks, bright whites, and all the grayscale in between. The picture
has a crisp clarity of every detail and the original film grain visible in its
1080p, 24fps presentation. There is a remixed 5.1 stereo audio track that is
full of annoying echo effects, but at least there’s the option of the original
mono soundtrack, which sounds reasonably good and is far preferable. Theres also a quite interesting audio commentary recorded
in 2005 with actor George Cole, who played the young Scrooge in the flashbacks.
There are high-definition copies of the original
British and American trailers included, along with a brief promo for other VCI
releases. The only other bonus item is an optional popup trivia track that
provides background tidbits superimposed over the bottom right of the picture.

The enclosed DVD includes one additional
audio track with description of the action for the visually impaired, as well
as an extra copy of the complete film cropped to the 16x9 format for widescreen
TVs (for people who’d rather miss part of the image because they don’t like pillarboxing for 4x3 movies and dont
understand the zoom functions on their widescreen TV sets).

All in all, its a great BluRay release
of a great film, with only a few minor digital glitches in the encoding (unless
it was my player) that make the picture occasionally appear to skip frames, and
a couple of times do very brief but odd-sounding things to the soundtrack.

A
CHRISTMAS CAROL
on BluRay

Movie:
A+ / Video: A- / Audio: B / Extras: C+

CITY GIRL (1930)

A perfect example of the value of
film preservation is the case of legendary German director F. W. Murnau, renowned for Nosferatu, Faust, The Last Laugh, Sunrise, and Tabu. Murnau
was brought to Hollywood to help raise the artistic reputation of American
films. The first result was his timeless and Oscar-winning visual parable Sunrise (1927), now available on DVD in
the U.S. and on BluRay from Great Britain. His next
film, Four Devils (1928), was
critically acclaimed and a success at the box office, but no longer survives in
any form except for the original screenplay and some production stills.

In 1929 Murnau
made his next film, a lyrically romantic yet often grimly realistic look at the
clash between rural and urban America, City
Girl, set largely on a Minnesota farm. A hard-headed old farmer’s naïve son
travels to Chicago to sell the family crop, and returns with a new wife -- a
world-weary young waitress who longs for the peaceful, pastoral life she’s seen
in nature paintings. The father is suspicious of a “city woman” and the wife
soon realizes that farm life is much tougher than she’d imagined.

A triumph of silent cinematic
storytelling, it was produced during the turbulent period when Hollywood was
switching to sound film production. The studio took over the film, hastily
re-shot the ending with talking sequences, and released it in 1930 as a
part-talkie that was quickly forgotten and later destroyed in a vault fire.

For decades City Girl was considered a lost film until amazingly the original
silent director’s cut was discovered in 1970, but it remained difficult to see
until Fox Video included it in a lavish 2008 DVD box set of several films made
by Murnau and director Frank Borzage
at the studio during the 1920s-30s. The butchered theatrical release of City Girl and its sound track remain
lost.

Earlier this year, Eureka Video’s
Masters of Cinema Series released Murnau’s original
silent cut of City Girl on a
region-free BluRay, with the effective new 2008 music
score composed by Christopher Caliendo for the DVD
set. The high-definition transfer is a superb rendition of what the
well-preserved 35mm print actually looks like, with rich blacks, grays, and
whites, and no artificial digital enhancements or grain reduction. As a result,
occasional minor scratches and dirt show up, but this is not distracting in the
least with such a sharp picture. The music score is presented in a choice of
either a good Dolby Digital 2.0 recording or an excellent 5.1 DTS-HD Master
Audio soundtrack.

There are few bonus features, but
one is an excellent audio commentary by a film scholar and the other is a nice
28-page illustrated booklet with a critical evaluation and credits for both the
film and the DVD.

The City GirlBluRay makes the perfect
complement to Eureka’s earlier BluRay release of Murnau’sSunrise,
and many modern critics actually consider it the better film.

CITY GIRL on BluRay:

Movie: A / Video: A /
Audio: A+ / Extras: B

CRONOS (1993)

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is best-known among mainstream American moviegoers
for his genre action-horror pictures Mimic
(1997), Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004)
and broke through to more sophisticated audiences with the
multi-Oscar-nominated Pan’s Labyrinth
(2006). His very first feature, however, the Mexican-made Cronos (1993), is a thoughtful, mulit-layered metaphoric horror-fantasy that remains
arguably his best and certainly deserves wider recognition. Cronos came out on Blu-ray in
December 2010 from Criterion.

Cronos deals with such themes as
time (hence the title), decay and death, the desire for immortality, greed,
addiction, self-sacrifice, the complexity of human relationships, religious
ritual, and more, all in the guise of what is essentially a vampire film,
although it never uses the word “vampire.” Like the recent Let Me In and its Swedish source, Let the Right One In, it focuses on characters more than thrills,
meticulously establishing details of their lives and their surroundings that
reinforce the motifs symbolizing various issues the director brings up. Some of
those are direct references in the plot and others are evoked through careful
control of color, props, and image composition.

The basic plot concerns a medieval
alchemist’s invention of an insect-shaped device that is able to prolong life,
and the accidental discovery of that device centuries later by an aging
antiques dealer and his quiet, alienated little granddaughter. Unfortunately a
wealthy, dying industrialist is ruthlessly searching for the device, leading to
the film’s few action sequences. Ron Perlman stars as the industrialist’s crude
American nephew who does his dirty work and is ironically named Angel de la
Guardia. The cast is uniformly excellent, as for his first picture del Toro was able to get legendary Spanish-language stars
Federico Luppi and Claudio Brook.

An amazingly dense film (the
director was only 21 when he started writing the script and 28 when he filmed
it),Cronos is less a horror film than it is an adult fairytale,
an approach del Toro continued in Pan’s
Labyrinth. The film is an engrossing exploration of human nature with a
pervasive gothic, melancholy mood, but an ultimately satisfying (though
certainly non-Hollywood) resolution. Cronos was a huge hit in Mexico, winning numerous awards
there and at various international festivals (including Cannes), but never
managed to achieve much success in the United States.

Criterion’s high-definition
transfer to Blu-ray is superb, supervised by the director and cinematographer,
and it has a fine DTS-HD stereo soundtrack in Spanish and some English, with
English subtitles. There is a very good array of bonus features, including two
audio commentaries (recorded in 2002 for the 10th-anniversary DVD),
interviews with the director and stars, a stills gallery, a trailer, a featurette with del Toro conducting a tour of his
horror-fantasy memorabilia collection, and an amusing 1987 short horror-fantasy
he shot as a teenager but finally finished last year. There’s also a 44-page
booklet with cast, credits, an appreciative analytical essay, and excerpts from
del Toro’s preproduction notes he made to explain the
characters’ backstories and symbolic visual motifs for the cast and crew.

Possibly his most personal film to
date (the director’s commentary reveals many connections to his childhood and
his general philosophy),Cronos also displays themes and
motifs that show up in del Toro’s later work. It’s essential viewing for
devotees of horror and of artistic self-expression.

CRONOS on Blu-ray

Movie:
A / Video: A+ / Audio: A / Extras: A

THE CROWDED DAY (1954)

Volume 3 in the British Film
Institute’s collection of films from the low-budget Adelphi Studios features The Crowded Day and Song Of Paris, two early 1950s films by John Guillermin
(best known for his Hollywood work including The Towering Inferno, Death On The Nile, The Blue Max, and the 1976
King Kong).

A generally pleasant drama with
touches of comedy and a few darker episodes in the "Grand Hotel"
mode, The Crowded Day follows the
lives of a variety of department store employees from early morning to late
night on a single day during the Christmas season.

It remains an impressive film
overall, with strong acting and reasonably interesting characters with
believable problems. It's also a good glimpse into the life of everyday people,
their customs, and attitudes in mid-1950s Britain. Guillermin's
sure direction of the multiple overlapping story lines, some striking
cinematography, and a large cast of veteran actors as well as rising stars,
place it on solid footing with the more prestigious British studios.

THE CROWDED DAY on Blu-ray:

Movie: B+/Video: A/Audio: A/Extras: D+

DARK CITY (1950)98m*** ½

This is easily
the best of the four pictures in the Olive Films Film Noir Collection Volume
One, and is the closest to a real film noir even though there’s no archetypal
femme fatale. There are small-time professional gamblers, a damaged ex-boxer, a
sad, aging lounge singer, a disturbed vet with a more-disturbed brother, and a
hard-nosed cop. The troubled, flawed characters live in a seedy, dangerous, and
unpredictable urban world where they’re haunted by the past, allegiances can
easily shift, and hasty schemes to make a buck can quickly backfire. Events
they can’t control may quickly change their livelihoods or even threaten their
lives. This is the world of film noir.

William Dieterle directs a powerhouse cast in a decent script
produced by Hal Wallis, effectively scored by the great Franz Waxman (actually,
perhaps a bit overscored at times), and gorgeously
shot by Victor Milner. Charlton Heston is excellent
in his Hollywood debut as a disillusioned college grad with a mysterious past
that has led him to run a (Chicago?) bookie joint, closed down in the opening
sequence when new police captain Dean Jagger raids
the place. Two of Heston’s low-life sidekicks are, of
all people, Jack Webb as the extra-cynical and mercenary one and Harry Morgan
as the amiable if slow-witted one with a heart, plus Ed Begley as the worried
one with an ulcer. Lizabeth Scott is the singer
willing to stick by Heston no matter what. They arrange
to con a very naïve visiting L.A. businessman (Don Defore)
into a high-stakes poker game, which leads to the main thrust of the film after
he’s found dead in his room the next day and the gamblers learn that his
psychopathic brother (Mike Mazurki) is now after all
of them. During the process, Heston travels to Los
Angeles hoping to romance Defore’s widow (VivecaLindfors) to get
information, and eventually goes to Las Vegas, where the final action takes
place and we have a certain amount of personal redemptions and resolutions not
often found in classic noir. It’s a great noir trip along the way, however.

The HD transfer
on Olive’s Blu-ray seems to be excellent, and much of the picture looks
excellent, but there are also many scenes with some regular slow pulsating
flicker (perhaps the initial stages of decomposition on the negative?) and a
few scenes that appear to show a weird warping effect. The audio is good,
although a few scenes have some background noise.The only extras, as usual for Olive, are a
main menu and chapter menu.

DARK CITY on Blu-ray –

Movie:
A/Video: B+/Audio: A-/Extras: F

DEADLINE (2009)

Every so often an independent
filmmaker lucks out and gets a couple of recognizable stars to like his script,
which then attracts enough investment money to shoot on 35mm film with a full
crew and even special effects. Of course adequate promotion and distribution to
find its proper audience can still be a problem after the film is completed.
Such is the case with Deadline, an
above-average little suspense-thriller by Sean McConville,
starring Brittany Murphy and Thora Birch. It was shot
in 2008, made the rounds of festivals and film markets about a year ago, came
out on video late last year, and got some international theatrical showings
earlier this year after the untimely death of Murphy.

Deadline is the first writing and directing credit for McConville, a former prop man who originally planned to
shoot his movie on mini-DV for around $50,000 until the stars and money
materialized for a more ambitious effort. In true indie-script fashion, the
script calls for only four characters, one of whom is seen only at the
beginning and end, and two of whom are a parallel
story-within-the-story viewed on video.

McConville’s
years in film art departments certainly paid off in his atmospheric mise en scene. He also is effective at directing this
fairly formulaic genre picture, and some sketchy plot elements are often made
up for by the mostly strong performances of Murphy and Birch.

The film appears to be a standard
ghost story set in an old dark house and will call to mind any number of other
films. Murphy plays a screenwriter who has had a nervous breakdown and wants
the isolation of this remote house so she can finish her current project by the
deadline. Of course weird things start to happen in the house and she soon
discovers a box of camcorder tapes left by the previous residents a young
couple whose recorded lives reveal unhappy and unsavory secrets. How those
secrets relate to her own life and present situation
are the key to unraveling various layers of plot.

The vast majority of viewers who
have reacted on the imdb were bored, confused, and/or
generally dissatisfied with the film, having expected more thrills and shocks
instead of the emphasis on moody atmosphere and psychological twists. Its only
85 minutes long, most of that devoted to Murphy’s character wandering through
the house or watching the videos she’s found. Perhaps another five or ten
minutes could have made things more clear, but could just as easily have overexplained the character relationships with no room for
ambiguity.

There are obvious comparisons to
the film TheSecret Window, among others, but Deadline is closer in spirit to MulhollandDrive without David Lynch’s
perversely disturbing sense of humor or audio-visual audacity. Like a Lynch
film, it may take a repeat viewing to recognize various clues planted about
what is really going on. Murphy’s real-life death within
weeks of the video release gives an even eerier sense to watching the film (as
well as to its uncomfortably prescient cover art).

The BluRay
of Deadline can be found in the
modest $12 to $16 price range, making it worthwhile for fans of off-beat
thrillers and indie films or either of the two stars. The hi-def transfer of both the image and sound is first-rate,
preserving the film look and the bleak, dark environment with plenty of
background music and sound effects to help tell the story (as there is very
little dialogue). The only bonus features are a brief but interesting making-of
documentary, a trailer, and previews to a few other Firstlook
Studios releases, all in standard-definition.

DEADLINE on BluRay:

Movie: B / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: D+

DR. STRANGELOVE (1964)

The Cold War was still raging in
the 60s, and Stanley Kubrick’s masterful dark satire Dr. Strangelove (1964) made its BluRay
debut the summer of 2009. The film is an actors’ showcase, especially for Peter
Sellers in his multiple roles, for George C. Scott, ad for various character
actors like the unforgettable Slim Pickins. It’s got
some good featurettes but all are
standard-definition, and there is no commentary (though there’s a booklet and
an interesting picture-in-picture background info option).

DR. STRANGELOVE on BluRay:

Movie A- /Video
A /Audio A /Extras
B+

THE EGYPTIAN (1954)140m** ½

This Michael Curtiz historical epic is widely dismissed as a dull
sword-and-sandal soap opera about dull characters with dull performances. Some
have called THE EGYPTIAN one of the worst films of all time or at least the
worst film of 1954. While it’s true the film has a lot of problems, not the
least of which include some miscasting, sluggish pacing, disconcerting plot
gaps, and way too many lengthy, over-written, heavy-handed moralistic speeches,
there’s still a lot to appreciate. In fact there are viewers who count it among
their favorites. Admittedly tedious at times, the film seems to have a sincere
heart in its attempt to dramatize the always-timely life-long search for a
sense of self-worth, inner peace, and understanding of human nature. However,
it tries just a little too hard to make obvious parallels even more obvious
between the revolutionary ancient Egyptian reign of the fanatic monotheistic
Pharaoh Akhenaten and the Judeo-Christian tradition that would arise some 1300
years later. As a result it may come off as a pseudo-Biblical parable aimed at
Sunday-school classes rather than popular entertainment made for mass
audiences.

Loosely inspired
by actual historical incidents, ancient records, and ancient Egyptian
literature, the film does an admirable job of recreating a reasonably accurate
surface impression of life in ancient Egypt, despite the sizable number of
errors, anachronisms, and “artistic license” that no historical movie can avoid
completely. The film’s acting performances actually are not bad – they’re just
often so underplayed and introspective that it’s difficult to become involved
in the characters. In other words, they’re almost the complete opposite of the
stylized high melodrama of Lubitch’s DAS WEIB DES
PHARAO or the larger-than-life heroic and villainous archetypes in the
historical epics of DeMille and his imitators.

The plot is
designed as a flashback recounting the adventures and observations of a
now-aged Sinuhe (Edmund Purdom)
during the reign of Akhenaten (Michael Wilding). As a youth he studies to
become a physician while classmate Horemheb (Victor
Mature) trains to be a soldier. Starting his career as a naïve idealist, Sinuhe soon becomes rather inexplicably entranced by a
notorious Babylonian courtesan called Nefer (Bella Darvi) who rapidly drives him to shame and financial ruin.
Eventually realizing the error of his blind passion, Sinuhe
becomes a cynical wanderer traveling the known world and becoming more and more
disgusted by the pettiness and injustice of humanity. Meanwhile the
single-minded pacifistic policies of Akhenaten have driven Egypt’s reputation
into the ground and sparked widespread grumblings of rebellion, and Sinuhe returns home only to become involved in an
assassination plot. Meanwhile the sensible tavern-girl Merit who has always
loved him (Jean Simmons) has not only borne him a son (Tommy Rettig) but has converted to Akhenaten’s monotheistic cult.
After two hours of pageantry and meandering plotlines, the film finally comes
to a climax with some action sequences when Horemheb
and the “evil priests” begin their active revolution and persecution of
Akhenaten’s gentle, peace-loving followers.

Standouts in the
cast are Jean Simmons, who deserved much more screen time, and Peter Ustinov as
Sinuhe’s rascally one-eyed servant, who easily steals
every scene he’s in. Though his plot function is subservient to that of Sinuhe, Mature is fine as Horemheb,
who in this story is the one to overthrow Akhenaten (there were actually a
couple of other pharaohs, including the famous Tutankhamen, in between their
reigns). Gene Tierney is also strong (and also sadly under-utilized until the
ending) as Akhenaten’s fiercely masculine half-sister who wants to rule in his
place. Purdom is really not bad as the central character
of Sinuhe, but lacks the screen charisma that a
Tyrone Power or Marlon Brando might have breathed into the role. Dirk Bogarde and Farley Granger had turned down the part, but
may well have played it much as Purdom does. Brando
had actually been signed, but quit after meeting Bella Darvi
(and wound up playing Napoleon in DÉSIRÉE to fulfill his contract). Darvi is attractive and adequate as the courtesan but
either she or Curtiz (or both) is unable to make the
audience believe she’s somebody Sinuhe would be
unable to resist. Tierney or Simmons or someone like Joan Collins could have
been far more seductive if they’d had her part. Marilyn Monroe (who reportedly
wanted that role) might have been an interesting choice with the right
direction. Wilding plays Akhenaten as if he’s in his own little world without
much complexity to his character, and perhaps that’s intentional but it also
tends to lose him the sympathy that the script and end title cards seem to
expect the audience to have for him. Veteran character actors like Henry Daniell, John Carradine, Judith
Evelyn, Mike Mazurki, Michael Ansara,
and others round out the cast with solid support, making their scenes memorable.

The spectacular
CinemaScope cinematography (which earned Leon Shamroy
an Oscar nomination) and elaborate art direction help give viewers something to
look at when they become tired of the performances (although the many uses of
matte shots are obvious, whereas DAS WEIB DES PHARAO had used full-size sets
and even larger crowds of extras). There’s also a fine music score by Alfred
Newman and Bernard Herrmann, as well as effective use of directional dialogue
in the stereo soundtrack. Seeing this in high quality on a big screen with a
good sound system makes up for many of the film’s dramatic deficiencies. It’s
really an entirely different experience from trying to sit through it on TV.

The HD transfer on
Twilight Time’s Blu-ray (that company’s very first release in the Blu-ray
format) is truly superb, with brilliant colors, crisp textures, fine details,
and natural film grain preserved beautifully. The original four-track stereo is
effectively mixed into a lossless DTS-HD 5.1 soundtrack that sounds great.
Bonus features include an 8-page illustrated booklet with an appreciative essay
on the film by Julie Kirgo, an interesting audio
commentary by film historians Alain Silver and James Ursini
(departing from their usual film noir specialty), an isolated music score
track, and the original theatrical trailer (albeit in standard-def). THE EGYPTIAN was released to Blu-ray and DVD in
limited 3000-copy editions. While it may not appeal to a wide audience, it belongs
in the collection of any Egyptophile, fans of historical epics, and devotees of
early CinemaScope productions and/or 1950s Hollywood.

THE EGYPTIAN on Blu-ray –

Movie:
B-/Video: A+/Audio: A/Extras: B-

ESCAPE TO ATHENA (1979)

Escape to Athena
(1979) is an international production filmed on location on the Greek island of
Rhodes that’s a diverting World War II action adventure prison camp picture
with an all-star cast. It does not seem to be available in the U.S., only as a
Region 2 PAL DVD and as this region-free BluRay from
Britain's ITV.

The plot's sort of
a "Great Escape" meets "Kelly's Heroes" (the latter of
which is now on a nice BluRay) with assorted other
familiar elements that sometimes vary wildly from heavy and disturbingly
serious melodrama to smart satire to broad slapstick. David Niven
plays a British archaeologist in a German prison camp run by Austrian officer
Roger Moore(!), both of whom would rather be
collecting antiquities than fighting a war. Meanwhile TellySavalas is in the head of the local Greek
underground, aided by Claudia Cardinale as a madame of the local House of Eros.

Other prisoners
include Richard Roundtree (the token Black sergeant)
and Sonny Bono (as an Italian), joined by the recently captured USO
entertainers Stefanie Powers and Elliott Gould. There's even a cute throwaway
prison camp cameo by William Holden (star of the classic Stalag 17). Eventually they come up with a plan to seize some priceless
gold artifacts and escape with the help of their commandant!

Of course there's
lots of action and things don't always go according to their plans. While not
particularly memorable, it's all competently done and provides a good two hours
of entertainment if you're in the WWII adventure-comedy-drama mood (i.e., a
perfectly good "program picture," especially at a bargain price).
This disc has the 119-minute European cut rather than the 125-minute version
shown in England, or the 101-minute American release (which often gets further
trimmed for local TV station broadcasts).

The movie looks
pretty good overall, with a few soft spots here and there in the widescreen
image that I'm not sure if are due to the transfer, a warped print, or the
film's lower budget not permitting retakes. The sound is mono but certainly
adequate if you turn up your subwoofer response a bit. There's over an hour of
cast interviews as bonus material, but unfortunately it's all in the PAL
format, so some American players may show nothing but a black screen with audio
that sometimes jumps around. There's no audio commentary. At least the original
trailer is presented in full 1080p, so it shows up quite nicely on a big
screen.

ESCAPE TO ATHENA on BluRay:Movie: B- / Video:
B+ / Audio: C+ Extras: C (or a B
if you can play the PAL content)

THE FOUR HUNDRED BLOWS (1959)

Low-budget independent filmmaking
has co-existed with studio-financed mass-market movies for over a century. But
almost exactly 50 years ago it suddenly gained international respectability
after a group of film critics, theorists, and self-professed movie fanatics in
France decided to start making their own films the way they wanted to make them
about the subjects they wanted to treat. The result became labeled as the
French New Wave, a movement that was not afraid to experiment with new
cinematic techniques (as often as not due to budget limitations), and that
considered the director as the primary author, or auteur of the finished film.

A few of these films debuted in
1957-58, but in 1959 a virtual explosion of them hit theatre screens, winning
festival awards and critical acclaim, films like Breathless, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Black Orpheus, and The Four Hundred Blows, from directors
Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Marcel Camus, and
François Truffaut, respectively. Many more followed throughout the next ten
years. All had a strong influence upon a new generation of Hollywood filmmakers
starting their careers in the 1960s, such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese,
and Francis Ford Coppola. Their impact continues to this day with yet another
generation of independent-minded directors. For decades these films were often
seen in grainy 16mm dupes or murky video copies with any widescreen productions
having the sides of their images lopped off. In March 2009 the Criterion
Collection released Truffaut’s The Four
Hundred Blows on BluRay in a sparkling new
high-definition transfer from a 35mm master fine-grain print and with its
original 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio intact.

The Four Hundred Blows was the first feature-length film by
François Truffaut, yet won him Best Director at Cannes that year, Best Foreign
Film from the New York Film Critics, and an Oscar nomination for its
screenplay. The film’s title is a translation of a French idiom that means
something to the effect of “Raising Hell” or “Running Wild.”

The story covers a few months in
the life of Antoine (in an amazing performance by Jean-Pierre Leaud), a troubled 12 to 13-year-old boy who is an only
child alienated from his loveless family, his authoritarian teachers, and all
but one of his disinterested classmates. His one friend helps him skip school,
sneak into movies, run away from home, steal a typewriter, and get into other
trouble, until Antoine is finally sent away to a reform school, from which he
again tries to escape. What in the hands of Hollywood producers might become
either a scathing social commentary or a feel-good story of triumph over adversity, is presented by Truffaut as a matter-of-fact,
unsentimental portrait of an average boy dealing with whatever life throws at
him. The film focuses on details of daily life rather than carefully organizing
cause-effect relationships into a typical and predictable self-contained plot.
Many if not most of the incidents were thinly disguised episodes from
Truffaut’s own childhood, and like a number of films by Steven Spielberg it
depicts the children’s point of view throughout. Part of the films power comes
from its documentary-like style, largely a by-product of its low budget that
required using black and white film, actual locations, improvised dialogue,
post-dubbed audio, and then-unknown actors. The gray
skies and stone buildings, accentuated by the monochromatic image, contribute
greatly to the feeling of the characters gray moral sense, yet the film never
becomes morose.

In his first film, Truffaut also
tried to follow the advice of his friend and mentor, film theorist André Bazin, who complained that excessive editing destroyed
films potential for realism. Thus there are many long takes that allow the
viewer to explore the mise en scene in the carefully
composed widescreen images, so each cut tends to make a much stronger dramatic
impact than films whose shots average only a few seconds each. This style tends
to make portions of the film drag in pacing, but it is a good fit for the story
Truffaut is telling and helps intensify both the mood and the performances of
the actors. The very long take at the end of the film, and especially its
concluding freeze-frame and optical zoom into young Antoine’s ambiguous
expression, became copied in countless films and TV commercials over the next
twenty years. Truffaut, unfortunately died at age 52 in 1984, but managed to
make about two dozen features, five of which starred Léaud
in the continuing saga of Truffaut’s alter-ego Antoine over a period of twenty
years.

Watching Criterion’s Blu Ray edition of The
Four Hundred Blows is like taking a trip back in time. Dirt and scratches
on the film were digitally removed and the audio was also digitally cleaned up
for the uncompressed PCM soundtrack. Finally American audiences have the chance
to experience what the film looked and sounded like when it was new.

There are several interesting
bonus features on the disc, although only in standard-definition and nothing
new for this edition. They include screen tests by some of the child actors,
newsreel footage of young Jean-Pierre Léaud attending
the films Cannes showing, fascinating interviews with Truffaut from 1960s TV
programs, the original trailer, plus two different audio commentaries and a
printed flyer with program notes. One of the commentaries is an informative
combination of critical analysis and background history by a film professor,
and the other is a charmingly nostalgic interview of Truffaut’s childhood
friend Robert Lachenay.

Anyone interested in independent
or foreign films needs to see The Four
Hundred Blows, and many will probably want to own a copy.

THE 400 BLOWS on Blu Ray:

Movie: A-Video:
AAudio: AExtras: B+

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

Gone
With the Wind, a legendary film from the height of
the Hollywood studio era, made its world premiere over 70 years ago, in
December 1939. Since that time, the epic saga adapted from a best-selling novel
of a family just before, during, and after the American Civil War has become as
much a part of our culture as the war itself. It’s basically another soap opera
of characters personal problems against the historical backdrop. But it’s also
a vivid recreation of a way of life gone with the wind as nostalgically
imagined by the descendents of the generation that
lived it, a collective oral history re-enacted on the screen through memorable
characters that continue to touch an emotional core.

The movie, quite simply, is an American
classic that is able to overcome a variety of flaws and appeal to later
generations in a way nearly as timeless as such masterpieces as The Wizard of
Oz or Its a Wonderful Life. Scarlett and Rhett’s story
resists the remake syndrome, and was regularly re-released theatrically through
the 1990s. Warner Home Video, current owners of the film, have gone back to the
original camera negatives to restore the picture and sound digitally in such a
way that the BluRay actually looks better than many
if not most of the 35mm film prints shown in theatres.

The 70-year-old sound quality may not be
quite up to 21st-century recording standards, but sounds amazingly
good, and is tastefully remastered for stereo
surround, with the original mono track as an available option (not to mention
numerous foreign-dubbed versions, and a very good audio commentary by historian
Rudy Behlmer, full of information on the production,
personnel, and historical background).

The picture quality is actually better
than BluRay transfers of some films made today, both
in clarity and in color. People who have never seen Gone With the Wind in a theatre, especially if they’re used to the
image of old movies on numerous poor video copies, may have a hard time
believing that it was actually filmed in 1939.

The deluxe limited-edition anniversary
box set, designed for the hard-core GWTW fan, is lovingly packaged in a red
velveteen cardboard box with hardcover book of color photos, a miniature
reproduction of the original theatre program, a CD of the soundtrack,
watercolor painting reproductions, and more. There’s also another BluRay disc that contains over eight hours
worth of documentaries going behind-the-scenes, reflecting on its
success, describing its restoration, chronicling the amazing list of memorable
movies released in1939, along with a 1980 telefilm dramatizing the casting
difficulties, an historical short film about The Old South and a trailer
gallery. A separate DVD has a 6-hour documentary on the MGM studios (the same
one included as a bonus with The Wizard
of OzBluRay edition). The only disappointment is
that all bonus features are standard-definition.

The BluRay box
set is a bit pricey at $85 list (when it came out in 2009), but well worth it
to die-hard fans of the film, and as low as $40 through Amazon, the same or
less than the standard DVD set is often selling for in stores. Those who want
just the movie without the extras could find it exclusively at Target stores at
first, for about $40, sometimes discounted to about $35. By late 2010 it could
often be found for the more popular pricing of $10-$20.

GONE WITH THE WIND on BluRay:

Movie:
A / Video: A+ / Audio: A- / Extras: A-

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (1966)

The American Western is no longer
the staple of Hollywood cinema that it once was, but had a huge impact on
international filmmakers whose re-imagining of them have become major
influences upon today’s directors, notably Quentin Tarantino and Robert
Rodriguez, among others. One of the most influential filmmakers of the past
half-century is Italian director Sergio Leone, who almost single-handedly
changed the cinemas approach to making westerns with his “Dollars” trilogy in
the mid-1960s. EnnioMorricone’s
memorable music changed the scoring of westerns forever, and even became a pop
hit on record charts.

The third and perhaps most
popular of Leone’s key films, The Good,
the Bad, and the Ugly, premiered in Italy at about three hours in 1966, but
was cut by close to half an hour before its original American release the
following year. An earlier DVD of the 161-minute longest U.S. version (there
was also one at 148 minutes) included 14 minutes of deleted scenes copied from
an Italian print as bonus features, since there had never been an
English-language soundtrack made for them.

In 2002-03, MGM/UA restored all
the missing scenes that could be located from the original negatives, got back
Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach to dub in their dialogue, and remixed the audio
elements to create a 5.1 stereo soundtrack befitting the films epic scope.

The restored 179-minute version
of Il Buono, ilBrutto, e ilCattivo (The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) was scheduled to be the closing-night feature
at Il Cinema Ritrovato (The Rediscovered Cinema) film
festival in Bologna, Italy the fourth of July of 2009. However, American movie
fans can now see this complete version on an impressive new Blu-Ray disc
released in May 2009.

A simple story of three men
struggling to find a cache of hidden gold became in Leone’s hands an epic and
timeless tale of greed and mans inhumanity to man.
For the masses, he blended grand, action-oriented melodrama with dark comedy,
yet dealt with anti-heroes and incorporated a fair amount of ambiguity, which
had become more popular in European films. Although its three main characters
are merely fortune-hunters, Leone used the American Civil War as a major plot
element and political statement on war in general.

When the film first came out it
was a hit with audiences but critics and many viewers found it disturbingly
violent, compared to Hollywood films of the time and especially to what they
expected from traditional westerns. Today its violence appears relatively
moderate, and what stand out are Leone’s carefully composed widescreen images,
many inspired by noted artists or Civil War photographs of Matthew Brady, as
well as his trademark style of long takes and contrasting extreme close-ups
with extreme long shots.

The old DVD of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly looked
pretty good, especially all the close-ups, but the BluRay
(as one should expect) is substantially sharper, getting as much picture
information as possible from the original Techniscope
negatives. Its sharp enough that a number of slightly
out-of-focus close-ups are now more obvious than they had been on the standard
definition DVD. Overall the picture is quite good, with the film grain
preserved intact and occasional but minor film wear visible. Leone’s numerous
panoramic extreme long shots benefit the most from the high definition
transfer.

The old DVD had only mono
soundtracks in English, French, and Spanish. On the Blu-Ray, the original 1960s
mono soundtrack is included for purists, in its English version and Italian
version. The remixed 5.1-channel stereo track sounds quite good, without quite
the range of a new film but with a substantial amount of dialogue nicely directionalized across the screen, plus a few slightly
enhanced sound effects to fill out the bass and surrounds, with music ambience
also coming through the surrounds. The English stereo track is a 5.1 DTS-HD
Master Audio recording, the German 5.1 track is regular DTS, while the Spanish,
French, and Portuguese tracks are all 5.1 Dolby Digital.

Even though the box cover says
the film runs 161 minutes, it’s really 178 minutes. Since the deleted scenes
have been put back with new English soundtracks, there’s no need for them as
bonus items except in one case where the original negative had been too badly
damaged to include every shot. The torturing of Tuco
in the prison is in the restored print, but a slightly longer version copied
from a rare surviving Italian release print is included for comparison. There’s
also a lost scene reconstructed from stills and brief trailer clips.

Several other bonus items
(unfortunately all standard-definition), include three interesting featurettes on the film itself, one on its restoration,
another on the actual Civil War general and battle referred to in the story,
plus an audio essay about the composer and his score, the original American
trailer, and the original French trailer. Two audio commentaries repeat some of
the same information but elaborate and expand upon much more. The commentary by
historian Christopher Frayling is the most
interesting and informative, but the one by film critic Richard Schickel is also worth listening to.

While The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is not quite the masterpiece that
Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West
and Once Upon a Time in America are
(both also now on Blu-ray), it’s far more influential and the Blu-ray makes a
valuable addition to any film buff’s library.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY on Blu Ray

Movie: A-Video: A-Audio:
A-Extras: A-

GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1946)

Both Great Expectations and Black
Narcissus won the Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Art
Direction the same year, at a time when the awards were still split into Black
& White and Color categories. Great
Expectations was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay
(and probably should have won at least one of those awards, as well).
Interestingly, both films feature the late Jean Simmons in early prominent
roles while she was still a teenager.

Great Expectations was actually made in 1946 but got to the U.S. in
the summer of 1947. Director David Lean’s meticulous adaptation is one of the
best films made from any Charles Dickens novel. It captures the style and
atmosphere of Dickens perfectly, expertly condensing the densely detailed story
and coming up with a satisfying conclusion that is a bit different from either
of the books two alternate endings.

A superlative cast is led by John
Mills as Pip (with Anthony Wages remarkable as the young Pip), along with
Finlay Currie, Francis L. Sullivan, Martita Hunt,
Valerie Hobson (as the older version of Jean Simmons more memorable Estella),
and a young Alec Guinness.

The high-definition transfer for
the region-free British BluRay is nothing short of
spectacular, reproducing the rich grayscale of the film stock and the fine
textures of both the mise en scene and film grain
with a vividness that would make you swear you were watching an original 35mm
film print. There are a few sporadic moments where minor film wear shows
through, light black or white lines and specks inherent in the surviving
material, which otherwise looks as though it is brand new.

The audio is the original mono
track and sounds fine for the era, although some may wish to boost the bass on
their sound systems. This wonderful disc’s only drawback is the complete lack
of any extra features, unless one counts a main menu and chapter stops as a
bonus. Still, Great Expectations is a
film that belongs in every serious BluRay collection.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS on BluRay:

Movie: A+ / Video: A+ / Audio: A- / Extras: F+

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (1965)

George Stevens has a slightly different approach on most of the same
material covered in Nicholas Ray's KING OF KINGS (1961), with some interesting
ambiguities and a few odd choices here and there. It cuts and changes a few
things and adds a lot more, including Donald Pleasance as a "Dark
Hermit" who stands in for Satan at various times without appearing overly
supernatural. Charlton Heston is just as effective as
John the Baptist as Robert Ryan was in KING OF KINGS, but here the Salome
material is pushed into the background. The film's total running time is 199
minutes, again including Overture, Entr'acte, and Exit Music, but at least this
time over a black screen, making it easy for ambitious home theatre owners to
employ curtain cues if desired (except for a spurious MGM video logo tagged on
before the brief overture). Intermission comes at almost exactly two hours.

The second act, strangely, does not have quite the dramatic drive of the
first act, despite the obvious intensity of the subject material. This may be
due to eliminating the parallel plot of Barabbas and the insurgents, and
clouding the motivation of Judas as more of hurt jealousy that he's not getting
enough attention or being taken seriously (or any other subtext one might care
to read into it). The cast definitely looks more ethnically appropriate overall
than that of KING OF KINGS, but there are still several distracting early 1960s
haircuts and more blue eyes than there probably should be (including Max von Sydow's Jesus).

Cinematography and art direction are excellent, blending careful and
moody Hollywood lighting with far more realistic settings than in KING OF
KINGS. Still, Stevens frequently tries to recreate familiar religious artworks
and like many Biblical films, numerous scenes still seem like covering as many
bases as possible rather than examining characterizations to any great degree.
The crucifixion is obviously shot on a soundstage rather than location
(paradoxically, despite its primitive editing and even less character
development, the 1912 Kalem version FROM THE MANGER
TO THE CROSS still stands out as one of the most authentic film recreations in
this and many of its scenes). Like Ray's KING OF KINGS, Stevens' GREATEST STORY
EVER TOLD is one more decent addition to the canon of "life of
Christ" films. John Wayne's cameo as the centurion is the only really
distracting part of the film's all-star cast.

The Blu-ray's video quality is a huge disappointment for a film having
been shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with the extra-wide aspect ratio of 2.75:1,
and originally presented in Cinerama. Sadly, the picture looks equivalent to an
old 1970s-era local TV station's film-chain transfer from a 16mm print
(although it's got the letterboxed full picture width), heavily marred by
electronic "sharpening" and edge enhancement that puts a light
outline or halo around all objects, especially their right edge. This
processing also gives a thick layer of video noise that completely obliterates
fine details and any film grain (although some people might mistakenly
interpret the video noise and digital compression artifacts as film grain).

Although on a small screen or from a distance of more than a screen-width
or two it appears reasonably crisp, up close it's really no sharper than a
decent DVD, and actually is not as sharp as a really good DVD transfer made
from an HD master and run through an upscaling
player. In fact the two standard-definition bonus featurettes
generally look just as sharp as the feature and the 1080 24p trailer is a much
sharper transfer (unfortunately made from less sharp original elements a
generation or two further from the camera negative than the print used for the
feature). The feature's lossless DTS 5.1 stereo surround soundtrack is quite
good, with numerous examples of the directional dialogue that used to be
popular in the first decade or two of films with stereo sound.

There is no commentary and are only a few bonus items, but they're
reasonably interesting. One is a half-hour "making-of" featurette from the time the film was in production.
There's also a 15-minute 2001 documentary using some archival interviews of
some of the cast and crew from the 1980s. A brief alternate crucifixion
sequence made for Europe shows Judas holding a noose as he commits suicide (he
holds no rope in the American cut), but the audio for that clip has difficulty
playing on several different Blu-ray players. Then there's a trailer in HD,
much of which consists of printed critics' quotes before showing any clips.
This seems apparently transferred from an old 35mm CinemaScope trailer that's a
bit contrasty and shows some wear.

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD
on Blu-ray

Movie: B / Video: C+ / Audio: A / Extras: C+

GUYS AND DOLLS (1955)150m***

Loveable Damon
Runyon gangsters form the basis for a number of classic films, including Lady for a Day (now also on Blu-ray), Little Miss Marker, The Lemon Drop Kid, and
more, mostly set during the Prohibition era. In 1950 a couple of his stories
were adapted into a hit Broadway musical, and the 1955 film of Guys and Dolls keeps the flavor of the
1930s but updates it to the 1950s. The plot revolves around finding a location
for a floating crap game in the face of a heavier than usual police crackdown.
To get enough money to pay off the owner of a potential site, Nathan Detroit
(Frank Sinatra) bets gambler Sky Masterson (Marlon Brando) that he can’t get
mission worker Sarah Brown (Jean Simmons) to fly to Havana with him. Meanwhile
Detroit’s long-time showgirl fiancée Adelaide (Vivian Blaine, recreating her
Broadway role) keeps pressing him to give up gambling and get married. Of
course everyone eventually finds love, with plenty of music and comedy along
the way.

The catchy score
is among the best of 1950s musicals, although the film cuts out a few songs and
the original composer Frank Loesser wrote some new songs just for the film. The
Goldwyn film version, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz,
is able to open up the stage play a bit, but remains highly stylized, using
elaborate studio soundstages. Many of the dance numbers are recreated from the
stage production, with the fluidly moving camera adding greatly to their
impact. Marlon Brando gets a chance to show he could be more than a brooding
method actor, coming off quite well in the role that Sinatra would have
preferred to be playing (and singing). Brando does his own singing, and while
he may not have perfect pitch, his voice fits his character naturally, even if
he doesn’t have the style or experience of Sinatra. Simmons also does her own
singing, and quite well. Sinatra, of course, is Sinatra.

The Warner
Brothers Blu-ray is good but not perfect. The picture shows the full 2.55:1
CinemaScope aspect ratio and looks very good, if just a bit soft, likely due to
a bit too much Digital Noise Reduction that smooths
out the grain slightly. Colors are rich, but perhaps just a bit on the warmish,
yellowish side (in contrast to a crisp but slightly faded 35mm print I once saw
in which most of the yellows had faded almost away). The stereo sound is
wonderful, with many directional uses of singing and dialogue spaced across the
extra-wide screen. Very high frequencies, however, do seem somewhat muted so
that it’s not quite as crisp as one might expect, possibly from minor magnetic
wear on the masters used for the transfer. There is a nice selection of bonus
features, mostly two good retrospectives plus about eight minutes of extra
interviews apparently cut from one or the other of the documentaries. There’s
also a trailer and a half-dozen individual clips of songs, although sadly all
bonuses are in standard-definition and there’s no audio commentary.

GUYS AND DOLLS on Blu-ray –

Movie:
A-/Video: A-/Audio: A-/Extras: B

HALLOWEEN (1978)

An obvious film for watching in
late October is John Carpenter’s original Halloween
(1978). Stylish and suspenseful, it made a star of Jamie Lee Curtis and almost
single-handedly kick-started the cycle of bloody psychotic-slasher
films that continue to this day, although ironically
it showed very little blood itself. Perhaps a bit dated, it’s still effective,
thanks to its combination of moody cinematography and music with skillful
editing.

The BluRay
of Halloween is generally a good
transfer, but since the film was low-budget to begin with, a number of scenes
seem accidentally a bit too soft-focus. Audio is good if not particularly
outstanding. There is a nice audio commentary with the director, star, and
producer. A halfway decent featurette (in standard-def) and trailers round out the modest bonus features.

HALLOWEEN on BluRay --

Movie: B+ /Video: B+ /Audio:
B+ /Extras: B+

HIGH NOON (1952) 85m***

One of the all-time
classic American Westerns, often making lists of top 100 American films, High Noon was directed by German-born
Fred Zinnemann. He used the familiar trappings of the
Western to dramatize a timeless inner human struggle, that between following
one’s moral convictions to do one’s civic duty or to follow one’s personal
desires for love and safety, as well as the urging of friends to take the easy
way out.

Iconic western
hero Gary Cooper stars as a sheriff about to retire, get married and settle
down, but on his wedding day he gets word that a killer he’d sent to prison has
just been pardoned and is coming back for revenge with two of his cohorts. The
Sheriff’s new anti-violent Quaker bride (Grace Kelly) and the townspeople all
want him to leave town before the killer, who still has friends in town, shows up.
He believes a showdown is necessary, however, and tries to raise a posse to
face the gang, but everyone he contacts has some reason not to participate,
including his disgruntled deputy (Lloyd Bridges) who is upset he wasn’t chosen
to be the next sheriff. Naturally things build to a predictable but memorable
showdown with a few surprises. The powerhouse cast of numerous noted character
actors and future stars including Thomas Mitchell, Katy Jurado,
Lon Chaney, Jr., Harry Morgan, Jack Elam, and Lee Van Cleef
are able to suggest a far deeper backstory than what is dramatized in the
script. Subtly symbolic art direction, expertly composed cinematography by
Floyd Crosby (father of singer David Crosby), tight editing, and Dmitri Tiomkin’s effective music intensify the dramatic
performances. They also help point out the film’s unusual approach of playing
out the plot in almost exactly the 85 minutes it takes to watch on the screen,
rather than condensing and expanding time like most movies

Films like The Gunfighter (1950) were already
exploring the psychology of familiar Western character types rather than
focusing on action, and “High Noon” continued the trend. But due to the early
1950s timing of the film’s production, and its screenwriter being the soon-to-be
blacklisted Carl Foreman, many were quick to see the story as merely a metaphor
about the unfriendly witnesses at the House Un-American Activities Committee
hearings being deserted by their friends because they refused to compromise
their principles. While the similarities are obvious, the themes are much
deeper than its contemporary political overtones, getting down to basic human
nature, personal ideals, and will for survival. High Noon was nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay,
and Gary Cooper won the Oscar for Best Actor. The film also won Academy Awards
for its editing, music score, and song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling.”

The 60th
Anniversary Blu-ray from Olive Films has outstanding picture quality, with
crisp film-like details and contrast range. The audio is also very strong.
Rather atypically for Olive Films, this disc includes a couple of bonus
features (though both are in standard-definition): the theatrical trailer and
an interesting 20-year-old documentary retrospective discussing the film’s
making and legacy.

HIGH NOON on Blu-ray –

Movie:
A-/Video: A/Audio: A/Extras: B-

HELLRAISER (1987)

When it came out, horror writer
Clive Barker’s directing debut Hellraiser (1987) was one of the most disturbing films
released to mainstream theatres, and indeed may have helped inspire today’s
trend for body piercing. Most horror films are sadly lacking in both writing
and acting, but Hellraiser
was a definite step above average for the genre, never matched by its sequels.
Revisited today, it remains memorable, despite having been copied so often
since (the curse of any bursts of originality).

Someone notes in one of the bonus
interviews on the disc that the script was trying to be more like Ibsen with
monsters than the standard action-effects oriented gorefest,
and of course the story and characters are what still set it apart from the
rest. The visual and makeup effects hold up quite well against today's horror
schlock, despite and perhaps because of the traditional use of
makeup/props/animation in the years before CGI special effects.

The music, too, is quite
effective for its relatively low budget, reminiscent of John Williams blended
with Bernard Herrmann and Danny Elfman. Hellraiser’s only
real drawback is a sometimes campy performance by Andrew Robinson
(better remembered as the psychotic killer in Dirty Harry) as its all-too-earnest lead.

Picture quality is exactly as I
remember seeing it in the theatre, and audio quality is also very good. There
is a fine selection of extras, including a good (but 7-year-old) commentary
track and a number of interviews with various cast and crew members
(unfortunately all standard-def).

HELLRAISER on BluRay

Movie: A- Video: A Audio: A Extras: B+

THE HORSE SOLDIERS (1959)

The
Horse Soldiers may not rank among legendary director John Ford’s most
memorable work, but it is a solid action adventure based on an actual incident,
with good iconic roles for John Wayne and William Holden. It is also Ford’s
only feature film dealing with the Civil War (except for his brief episode in How the West Was Won, on Blu-ray from Warners).

Wayne plays a Union colonel leading
a raid south into Mississippi to destroy Confederate supplies and railroad
connections. Holden is a physician reluctantly assigned to the mission, often
at odds with official military policies, some of Wayne’s decisions, and war in
general. When they make camp at a plantation run by spunky young southern belle
Constance Towers (in her first major screen role), they discover she has
overheard their plans and force her to accompany them on the rest of the raid
so she can’t contact the Confederates. Naturally, the mutual distrust and
disgust between her character and Wayne’s gradually develops into mutual
respect, understanding, and more.

Wayne is fine in his familiar
persona and Holden’s performance is very reminiscent of his role in The Bridge On The
River Kwai (on Blu-ray from Sony) filmed two
years earlier. Though she never became a major boxoffice
name, Towers makes an impressive starring debut, hinting at some of the edgier
characters she’d get to play a few years later in Shock Corridor and The Naked
Kiss (both on Blu-ray from Criterion).

Although much of the film is
predictable and it tends to drag at times, the script does a good job setting
things up in logical progression, while revealing character background that
enriches the story beyond Hollywood formula. Ford’s direction handles
everything nicely with his trademark blend of drama, action, humor, and social
commentary, particularly some potent and poignant observations on war and human
nature.

The Blu-ray has an overall
excellent HD transfer at 1.66:1, with rich colors and a sharp, crisp image
throughout. In a very few sections optical duplication in the original print
softens the picture slightly (mainly titles and dissolves). The original mono
sound is very strong. Once again, this MGM/Fox disc has no main menu and no
bonus features other than the original trailer (in HD), chapter stops, and
multiple language and subtitle tracks, all accessible only through a popup
menu.

THE HORSE SOLDIERS on
Blu-ray

Movie:
A- / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: F+

HOUDINI (1953)

Hollywood movie biographies are
rarely noted for their historical accuracy, and Houdini is no exception, but this fictionalized saga of the famed
magician and escape artist is still fun to watch. Directed by George Marshall
and produced by George Pal, the film touches on the most memorable aspects of
Houdini’s legendary life. The on-screen chemistry between Tony Curtis and his
then-wife Janet Leigh (in their first film together) helps tie the episodic
script together and drive the action. Strangely, the film omits any mention of
Houdini’s (admittedly sporadic) film career.

This title is is
one of several licensed from Paramount that small distributor Legend Films has
released as Blu-ray double-features (in this case with the 1969 Tony Curtis
film, Those Daring Young Men In Their
Jaunty Jalopies). The picture, pillarboxed to
1.33:1, has very good quality overall, with beautifully saturated color,
although the print more often than not looks a bit soft and the three-strip
Technicolor records are not always in perfect registration. It may appear to
look better on a small 720p monitor than projected in 1080p onto a large
screen. The mono audio is reasonably good. There is a main menu but absolutely
no extras other than chapter stops (not even subtitles or any foreign language
tracks).

HOUDINI on Blu-ray --

Movie: B / Video: B+ /
Audio: A- / Extras: F

INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE (1994)

Vampire movies are again in
vogue, but one of the best was Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), adapted by Anne Rice from her
own best-selling novel. An excellent condensation of her extremely literate and
literary book, it captures the vampires melancholy and
philosophical fate as few films ever have (other than Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu or the
recent Swedish film Let the Right One In
and its surprisingly effective American remake Let Me In). Like the book, the film version of Interview with the Vampire also incorporates moments of wickedly
dark comedy.

Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise immerse
themselves in their roles of Louis and Lestat, and
young Kirstin Dunst is absolutely amazing as the
vampire child Claudia. Rice’s metaphoric revisionism of the vampire myth made
her series of novels hugely popular and inspired other variations on the genre.
It’s unfortunate the same cast and director never
attempted any of the sequels, which expanded Lestat’s
character to cult hero proportions (he’s mainly an antagonist in this first of
the series).

The BluRay
has a beautiful picture quality, fine audio, but disappointing extras. The
decent audio commentary almost makes up for the very cursory introduction
mini-documentary that precedes the feature, a brief featurette,
and a trailer, all in standard-def.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE on BluRay

Movie: A / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B-

THE IPCRESS FILE (1965)

Pretty much everyone is familiar with
the James Bond films as a series of light-hearted spy adventures, and is aware
it started with Sean Connery in films like Dr.
No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger. Most people have
likely seen at least photos if not clips or the entire films from those or
other 1960s Bond pictures. If not, many are now on BluRay
in painstakingly restored editions that look as if they were shot yesterday.

Spy movies have again become
popular with recent franchises like the “Mission Impossible” films and the
Bourne series, all serious-minded, taut, techno-thrillers. At the height of the
Cold War, the Bond films were all satiric, tongue-in-cheek and often
over-the-top comic sendups of heroes and villains and technology (and remained
so until Daniel Craig’s recent more serious-minded Bourne-like reimagining of
the iconic spy), and inspired many more spy comedies like James Coburn’s Our Man Flint pictures, and TV series
like The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, and others.

Fewer people are probably
familiar with the Harry Palmer spy film series starring Michael Caine, which
was also produced by Harry Saltzman, the man behind the first three Bond
movies. Whereas Connery’s Bond was a suave, sophisticate who could fight, kiss,
or talk his way out of just about anything, a fantasy hero for teenage boys,
Caine’s Harry Palmer was his antiheroic antithesis. He was an average guy, an
army sergeant with a shady past who found himself
trying to redeem his reputation as a secret agent in Berlin up against much
more disturbingly believable villains.

The first and arguably best of
three films featuring Caine’s Harry Palmer was The Ipcress File (1965). While there is a
definite irreverent and sarcastic attitude to Palmer, he’s not the glib punster
of Connery’s Bond. And although he also has a taste for women (without Bond’s
impeccable sense of style), Caine’s character is very much a realist who must
rely more on his wits than on fancy gadgets or superhuman fighting abilities to
survive his various ordeals and uncover what’s really going on. The cast is
uniformly excellent.

The Ipcress File was aptly billed in its
original advertising as “the thinking man’s Goldfinger,” and won three
British Academy awards when it came out, including Best Film, Best Art
Direction, and Best Cinematography. The cinematography is indeed striking, with
artful lighting and clever camera angles almost to the point that it looks like
an indie artfilm rather than a studio-made spy
thriller. It’s available in a nice BluRay edition
from Britain’s ITV DVD that is region-free, so it will play in all BluRay players.

Since it was shot in the “Techniscope” widescreen format, which uses half-height
frames on the film, it naturally had more visible film grain, especially in the
many low-light scenes that needed a faster emulsion. This grain comes through
intact in the fine high-definition transfer to BluRay,
and is most noticeable during the first half-hour or so of the film, as the
later portions apparently used finer-grain film stock.

The soundtrack has been remixed
well to Dolby Digital 5.1, but there’s also a 2.0 track available.
Unfortunately the only extras are the British theatrical trailer and a brief
stills gallery. It’s a bargain-priced disc, however, costing in the $15-20
range plus shipping from England (which typically takes about a week).

THE IPCRESS FILE on BluRay:

Movie: A / Video: A- /
Audio: A / Extras: D+

IS YOUR HONEYMOON REALLY NECESSARY
(1953)

Maurice Elvey
was an extremely prolific British director from 1913 through 1957, especially
noted for his 1927 classic Hindle Wakes.
Diana Dors was an ebullient blonde starlet often
called a British Marilyn Monroe for both her film career and often stormy
private life. The second Adelphi disc in the British Film Institute’s
collection of that low-budget studio’s films features two fine examples of Dors' work directed by Elvey, My Wife’s Lodger and Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary.
They’re a fascinating glimpse into everyday life in postwar Britain, with an
earthy blend of cheerful cynicism and low humor rather than the more polished
and urbane wit of, say, the Ealing comedies.

Is
Your Honeymoon Really Necessary (1953) is the main feature, a vehicle for
the comedic talents and physical attractions of the 21-year-old Dors, then a rapidly-rising star who would soon be out of
the price range of the small Adelphi Studios. The plot of this saucy bedroom
farce may be familiar (something of a variation on the Cary Grant-Irene Dunne
hit My Favorite Wife and its later
Doris Day-James Garner remake Move Over,
Darling), but the fine timing and execution keep it fresh and entertaining
throughout.

Several years after World War II an
American officer (Bonar Colleano) arrives in England
with a brand-new wife (Diana Decker), while wartime buddy Hank (Sidney James)
keeps gleefully recounting the times they used to have with his wildly
vivacious and curvaceous first wife, Candy (Diana Dors).
Within hours, Candy shows up at their apartment claiming that his California
divorce is not valid in England so they're still legally married. He
immediately calls his mild-mannered lawyer (David Tomlinson) to fix things, but
they all wind up spending his honeymoon night in the same apartment trying to
hide the facts of the dilemma from the confused and frustrated new bride.

Though certainly no Cary Grant, Colleano does a respectable job as the harried husband, and
Dors shines as the sexy ex-wife who revels in her
effect on men, particularly the shy lawyer she'd previously dropped to marry
the handsome American serviceman. Tomlinson (best-known to American audiences
as the father in Mary Poppins) is
also excellent, and Sidney James as the no-nonsense friend is the usual
endearingly blunt persona he'd develop further in the "Carry On"
films. Decker is quite good as the new wife, and stage actress Audrey Freeman
(Tomlinson's real-life wife) is a delight in her only screen appearance as a
love-hungry housemaid.

Picture and sound quality are
extremely good, and there’s an interesting booklet as the only extra (other
than a main menu and chapter stops).

IS YOUR HONEYMOON REALLY NECESSARY on Blu-ray:

Movie: A-/Video: A/Audio: A/Extras: D+

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL (1952)

This taut and nicely-plotted film
noir involves an intricate heist, a disgruntled ex-cop, several
crooks-at-large, and a nice-guy ex-con who is framed and must find out who
really pulled the job to clear himself (especially since he's fallen for a
beautiful law student). John Payne stars with Preston Foster, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam, Coleen Gray, and Neville Brand, fine
performances all around.

The Blu-ray is among the first in
what may be a wave of Public Domain films to be put out by low-budget
distributors to cash in on the hi-def craze. The good
news is that the picture quality is well above the stereotype of PD DVDs. In
fact the distributor even did a fair amount of digital restoration to eliminate
dust and scratches on the 35mm preprint (and included a brief before/after demo
to prove it). The print looks very clean indeed in the video transfer, with an
amazingly rich depth of blacks, grayscale, and whites that really show off the
excellent noir cinematography. That said, there is still just enough digital
noise reduction to soften the grain so that on a very large screen in full
1080p the textures of things like fabrics, wood, dirt, etc. never quite pop off
the screen like they do in superior transfers. It still looks quite good,
however, and on a 720p set, smaller monitor, or more than two screen-widths
away the picture is extremely impressive. The audio defaults to a completely
unnecessary 5.1 simulated stereo soundtrack, but there is an optional 2.0 mono
track that sounds reasonably good.

There are no bonus features
except for the very short restoration demo and a home-made half-minute trailer
edited from highlights of the film. Overall this is a very respectable Blu-ray
that is welcome addition to the slowly growing number of classics available in
HD (very little of which fall into the noir category). It certainly cannot
compare with Criterion's THE THIRD MAN, but it can hold its own against many of
the hastily-released bargain-priced catalog titles from Universal and MGM/Fox
that look good but could have been just a little better. Still, the "HD
Classics" Blu-ray from Film Chest is well-worth the $10-$12 it typically
sells for. The same company also has Orson Welles' THE STRANGER on Blu-ray, but
the screen captures I saw posted on Blu-ray.com were so distractingly
soft-looking that I never bothered ordering it, despite the nice range of deep
blacks and extensive grayscale. KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL is just soft enough to
be frustrating without being completely disturbing (and as I said, should look
extremely good on a smaller 720p screen, or if projected, from about two
screen-widths away where the grain would not be easily apparent anyway).

KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL on Blu-ray

Movie: B+ / Video: B+ /
Audio: A- / Extras: F+

KILLER MOVIE (2008)

Besides being an overall better
film than Midnight Movie, with which it
is often bundled, this second picture in the package will have a special appeal
for movie fans from this region. Killer
Movie is supposed to be taking place in the hockey-obsessed border town of
White Plains, North Dakota, and there’s even a tabloid newspaper called the
White Plains Reader!

The geography depicted doesn’t
quite mesh with what we know North Dakota to look like, and as it turns out, Killer Movie was actually filmed in
Minnesota. Perhaps North Dakota sounded funnier than Minnesota to writer-director
Jeff Fisher. This film not only has stronger acting, a larger cast, and a
slicker, more polished look than Midnight
Movie, but also a distinct tongue-in-cheek attitude that helps counteract
the expected bloody murders (which are neither supernatural nor quite as
over-the-top in kinky goriness as the other film).

The premise this time is that a
reality TV program has been assigned to shoot video in a small and isolated
town because its high school hockey team finally has a chance to make the
playoffs. The Hollywood crew naturally (and amusingly) must adjust to extreme
culture-shock, including no Starbucks and lack of cell phone performance,
besides their own personality clashes. You’ll also want to freeze-frame the closeup of the Dakotan Tribune to read all the headlines
that are throwaway gags.

The plots conflict begins when
the new director realizes his bitchy producer is using the heartwarming hockey
story as a cover to connect the sordid details of a teenagers
recent gruesome death to a recently released convict who used to be the hockey
coach. He’s also assigned a temperamental tabloid-fodder starlet as his
production assistant because she wants to do research for a serious film role.

The 91-minute Killer Movie does a good job at building
up character relationships of the TV crew and the townspeople, and in
developing a plausible story. While often quite funny, it doesn’t resort to
playing its familiar plot for obvious laughs or farce, but rather maintains
believable suspense amidst the satiric banter of the characters and dark humor
of some of its situations. It also comes to a conclusion that’s more satisfying
and certainly more logical than the other film. Part of its success is that
it’s primarily a well-plotted murder mystery about serial killings instead of
merely a clever excuse to depict gore effects on screen.

Unfortunately the only extras are
a brief but interesting featurette and a trailer.

KILLER MOVIE on BluRay:

Movie: B+ / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: D+

KING OF KINGS (1961)

Nicholas Ray's “King of Kings” is
not DeMille, but has its own advantages and flaws.
His 171-minute version of the life of Christ is, however, an interesting take
on the familiar material, sometimes as much for what it leaves out as for what
it includes and expands upon. Once one accepts that this was a major Hollywood
studio film aimed squarely at middle-America in the mid-20th century, it's not
difficult to find much of the film a reasonably involving historical drama with
an inspirational message. Like all such films, it needs to be viewed in context
as a part of the larger body of similar but often very different works (just as
the various Gospels, canonical and otherwise).

Warner Home Video's high-definition
transfer is excellent, a strong upgrade from the old DVD, now with crisp
details and textures as well as a fine film grain clearly visible. The DTS-HD
5.1 stereo audio is also very good, with occasional directional dialogue
noticeable. There are few bonus items, all in standard definition of various quality: just a trailer, an old featurette
and two newsreels of the premiere.

KING OF KINGS on Blu-ray

Movie: B+ / Video: A+ /
Audio: A / Extras: C-

KISS ME DEADLY (1955)

A pair of mid-1950s Robert Aldrich
films came out separately on Blu-ray the summer of 2011, VERA CRUZ and KISS ME
DEADLY. Each entertaining in its own way, and with both of them blending the
popular styles and genres of their times with subject material and an approach
a decade or more ahead of their times, they make for interesting viewing back-to-back.

Arguably Aldrich's masterpiece,
KISS ME DEADLY turns Mickey Spillane's popular Mike Hammer detective novel into
a combination gritty film noir and modern paranoid apocalyptic thriller. Hammer
(Ralph Meeker) is driving down the highway at night and swerves to avoid
hitting a girl wearing nothing but a trenchcoat (ClorisLeachman). She tells him
to forget her if he drops her at the nearest bus station, but to remember her
if they don't make it there. Soon after, they're run off the road, she's tortured
and killed while he's knocked unconscious, and they're both put back into his
car which is then pushed over a cliff. Of course Hammer barely escapes and
decides to investigate, against the wishes of the police, the FBI, and a bunch
of other people. The mystery has international repercussions beyond simple
criminal activity that Hammer, with the help of devoted secretary/lover Velda (Maxine Cooper) very gradually begins to unravel as
things become more and more dangerous for him and everyone he comes into
contact with.

The screenplay by A. I. Bezzerides changes the "McGuffin" from drug
dealing to atomic secrets, partly due to censorship concerns. It was also
notorious for inverting Spillane's brutal right-wing vigilante detective into a
brutal self-absorbed nihilist who was supposedly as reprehensible as those he
was up against, and ominously depicting the official forces of law and order as
no better than either. Although denounced for its violence even before it was
released (based on the novel's reputation and the script), most of the violence
actually occurs off-screen. The film was either excoriated or ignored by
mid-1950s American critics, but was lavishly praised as "the thriller of
tomorrow" by the left-wing French critics who would soon form the French
New Wave and became a cult arthouse hit.

Now over a half-century later, the
film appears to have it both ways, playing upon both traditions and fears of
its time while anticipating themes trendy two generations after its release.
Thanks to effective directing and acting (though Gaby Rodgers as "Lily
Carver" is a bit weak at times), it makes Hammer a more complex antihero
than perhaps it intended, it incorporates the dangerous femme fatale, yet it
also depicts a strong, independent-minded woman who is on the side of the
protagonist (who may certainly have "issues," but like Meeker's Hammer, is not completely unsympathetic). Velda may actually be the film's most sympathetic
character. Reflecting McCarthyism and the Cold War, the government is depicted
as both uncomfortably menacing yet worthy of respect. The film today ironically
fulfils the sociopolitical fears and expectations of
both the left and the right, and fits easily into modern concerns about
international terrorism vs. private greed. The same fear of big government it
depicts as a leftest issue in the 1950s is now a pet
issue of the right. Interestingly, Spillane disliked the film for many years
because of its distortion of his novel, but later changed his mind and felt
Meeker was the best of all the screen versions of Mike Hammer. The strong
supporting cast includes Jack Elam, Jack Lambert, and others who also appeared
in VERA CRUZ, as well as a young Strother Martin and
the ubiquitous Percy Helton.

Picture quality, as usual for
Criterion Collection releases, is very good to excellent, mostly the latter,
with a crisp 1.66:1 high-definition image that is consistently film-like and
shows the fine grain of the film and the textural details of settings and
costumes, along with rich deep blacks and bright whites. This is especially
effective in the strikingly shot noir night scenes (black and white film of the
period being inherently sharper to begin with than 1950s color film stocks).
Audio also is very good. Bonus features are up to the Criterion standard,
including a nice booklet with essays by J. Hoberman
and Aldrich himself (all cleverly designed in the style of a 1950s men's
magazine), a good audio commentary by noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini, featurettes about the
film, its locations, its screenwriter, and a documentary about Spillane.
There's also the original theatrical trailer (in HD) and an alternate shortened
ending that was on the film for many of its TV showings until recently.

KISS ME DEADLY on Blu-ray

Movie: A- / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: A-

THE LADYKILLERS (1955)

“The Ladykillers” (1955),
released in the US in 1956, is an entertaining black comedy with a typically
British flavor, marking the end of the Ealing era.
The cast is superlative and the comic caper story is droll, and though I've
never quite liked it as much as, say “The Lavander
Hill Mob,” I'd say it's at least as good as “The Man in the White Suit.”

Alec Guinness stars
as the head of a motley gang that takes refuge in the home of a sweet little old
lady.

This BluRay is from Lionsgate rather
than Criterion, and the picture quality is good, but far from the standard set
by BluRays of slightly older films like “Black
Narcissus,” “The Third Man,” “Great Expectations,” “An American In Paris,” et al. or Warners'
amazing restorations of “The Wizard Of Oz” and “Gone With The Wind.” Scratches
and dirt have been digitally erased, but on this film there seems to have been
issues with the three-strip color registration beyond the budget for fixing, as
a faint color fringe softens the otherwise very clear image. The picture is
presented in its original 1.37 ratio rather than cropped to 1.66, 1.78, or
1.85, and seems to look best that way even though it also appears
"protected" for a certain amount of cropping for widescreen (while
providing the option for people to crop it themselves through their TV sets or
projector settings if they prefer the widescreen look). Sound quality is
decent, though not what one would call memorable.

There are some very
good Criterion-like bonus features, including an introduction by Terry Gilliam,
an audio commentary, a variety of taped interviews, a somewhat contrasty but very sharp transfer of the original British
trailer in HD, and an illustrated booklet with quite an interesting essay on
the film's history and interpretation. THE LADYKILLERSon BluRay:Movie: B+ / Video:
B / Audio: A- / Extras: A

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1960)

Alain Resnais
enigmatic “Last Year at Marienbad” (L’annéedernière à
Marienbad) is a half-century old, yet is a cinematic experiment that is
still ahead of its time in the way it handles story material. Resnais collaborated closely with modernist novelist Alain
Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay as a challenge to traditional linear,
chronological, narrative storytelling.

The story situation is a familiar
love triangle. A man attempts to seduce a woman away from the man she is
currently with, trying to convince her that they met the year before and shed
promised to run away with him after a year. The way this is turned into a film,
however, plays around with Robbe-Grillet’s understanding of the difference
between mental time and real time, of past, present, and future in thoughts,
dreams, or suggestions.

Robbe-Grillet believed the
cinema, with its constant depiction of an immediate present whether events were
actually happening, had happened already (in flashback), would happen soon (in
flash-forward), might have happened, might happen, or were real or imagined was
an ideal medium for exploring his concepts of storytelling. No character is
named, as names are not important when its
the situation, mood, and techniques that are to dominate. Director Resnais found Robbe-Grillet’s ideas intriguing and an ideal
backdrop for exploring his own very visual sense of storytelling, an exercise
in style that focuses on details, poses, lighting, and other elements of mise en scene, with music and repetitive voiceovers to
accentuate the mood. He uses the camera and setting as a primary means to
convey information to the viewer, rather than traditional obvious causes and
effects or coherent continuity.

Even after such recent variations
in traditional storytelling as Memento,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
and Pulp Fiction, watching Last Year at Marienbad may be confusing,
incomprehensible, or infuriating for viewers unprepared for its unusual
approach. It had a decidedly mixed reception when first released, as well. It
was not accepted at the Cannes Film Festival, but after some initial audience
derision it went on to win the Venice Film Festival
and during its 1961 U.S. release earned an Oscar nomination for its screenplay.
It divided both audiences and critics, who proclaimed it a modern masterpiece
or denounced it as pretentious self-indulgence. Others recognized its dazzling,
even hypnotic visuals, but found its content trivial or pointless which was
exactly Robbe-Grillets point, that the form itself
WAS the point, and is what makes cinema an art.

The BluRay
disc has a beautiful, director-approved high-definition transfer of the
meticulously composed widescreen black-and-white image. While there is no audio
commentary, helping explain the film are three new sets of interviews with Resnais, with some of the other filmmakers (including
Volker Schlondorff), and with a film scholar,
totaling about an hour and a half, and all in high-definition. Also on the disc
are two short and interesting documentaries Resnais
made in the 1950s. All the Memory of the World (1956) is about the National
Library of France, but in many ways a precursor in style and content to Marienbad. In a very different vein is The Song of Styrene (1958), a poetic
depiction in color and CinemaScope of how plastic is manufactured. The package
also contains a 48-page booklet with photos, film credits, and several
illuminating essays about the film, including Robbe-Grillet’s introduction to
the published version of his screenplay.

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD on BluRay:

Movie: B+/Video: A/Audio: A/Extras:
A

THE LOVES OF PHARAOH (DAS WEIB DES
PHARAO) (1922) 98m***

Ernst Lubitsch’s second-to-last
German production, filmed in 1921, is one of the lavish historical epics he was
noted for in Europe before his Hollywood career, where he switched to primarily
the sophisticated sex comedies he’s remembered for today. The plot of DAS WEIB
DES PHARAO (literally “The Woman of the Pharaoh”) is an operatic melodrama of
doomed love, power struggles, and overbearing personal pride. It’s the ideal
material for an Emil Jannings film, and Jannings plays the Pharaoh Amenes
with a greater flamboyance than he’d given his Louis XV in Lubitsch’s MADAME
DUBARRY the previous year, but more controlled than his over-the-top
performance for Lubitsch in DIE AUGEN DER MUMIE MA a couple years before that
(both also featuring Harry Liedke as the romantic
lead, as he is here). Jannings’ Pharaoh foreshadows
elements in his portrayal of OTHELLO the following year, as well as hints of
future characterizations in films like THE LAST COMMAND, THE BLUE ANGEL, and
others -- the confident person of position and respect who becomes reduced to a
pitiful shadow of his former self. Here, however, his character is not
particularly sympathetic at the start, somewhat undercutting the powerful
concluding scenes.

In this story,
the wealthy, powerful, ruthless, and self-obsessed Pharaoh (Jannings)
has ordered construction of a massive treasury to secure his possessions, and
considers a political alliance with Samlak, the King
of Ethiopia (Paul Wegener) through marriage to his daughter Makeda
(LydaSalmonova). During
her trip to Egypt, however, Ramphis (Harry Liedtke), son of Pharaoh’s master builder (Albert Bassermann), happens upon her Greek slave girl Theonis (DagnyServaes), immediately falls in love and steals her away,
greatly annoying the Ethiopians. When the couple is captured and brought before
Pharaoh, however, he too falls for Theonis and plans
to marry her instead of Makeda. Naturally, this leads
to a war between the kingdoms. Various other complications develop as well,
after Theonis is walled into the treasury while
Pharaoh goes off to battle and Ramphis is condemned
to the quarries but escapes when war begins. Needless to say, there’s plenty of
high melodrama and dramatic irony throughout the film’s six acts, much of it
revolving around the age-old concept of “all for love,” with rulers willing to
sacrifice their kingdom for true love. There is also some interesting and
timely (then and now) political subtext about national pride vs. personal
pride, ruthlessness of dictators and their manipulation by underlings, and the
power of the people and/or the army to make or break its leaders on fairly
short notice. The film originally concluded at a happy ending point for the
American release but in European editions continued on another five or ten
minutes for a classically tragic ending.

Aided by American
backing from Paramount Pictures, who distributed THE LOVES OF PHARAOH in the
U.S., the production values are very high. The film’s art direction, with massive
sets, numerous props, and huge crowds of costumed extras, is sometimes
overwhelming in its scope. It suits the larger-than-life story well and does
quite an effective job of giving a reasonable impression of ancient Egypt
that’s far more accurate than most films of its era (and still more than a year
before Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered). The dramatic use of high-contrast
lighting calls to mind DeMille’s famous “Rembrandt”
look, as well as later German Expressionism. The actors do tend to look rather
more Teutonic than Egyptian, Ethiopian, or Greek, but that is fairly easy for
most audiences to ignore. Some modern viewers might be distracted, amused, or
put off by the stylized acting. A few moments (mainly during the playful
romantic scenes between Ramphis and Theonis, and the vain preening of Makeda)
are actually intended to be funny, and have the famed “Lubitsch touch.” The
rest is high melodrama with carefully calculated movements, gestures, and
facial expressions that are far removed from the low-key subtlety of Lubitsch’s
American films just a few years later. For those who can adjust to the intentional
artifice, however, especially in combination with Eduard Künneke’s
excellent original music score adapted and conducted by Frank Strobel, the performances and staging of the actors have a
graceful, ballet-like intensity that is very much like an opera without the
singing and no less expressive in conveying raw emotion. Künneke,
in fact, had composed operas before being commissioned to score this film in
1921.

The Blu-ray from
Alpha-Omega (the same company responsible for the film’s amazing digital
restoration) has a lovely HD transfer, with picture quality that varies from
good to excellent, depending upon the condition of the source footage. Color
tints reproduce the colors that were on surviving release print fragments. The
film was reconstructed from two large chunks held in two different archives,
several fragments from other archives, with still photos and title cards to
bridge what is still missing. Blue lettering is used for original titles with
white lettering for the reconstructed titles and explaining plot gaps. A couple
minutes of explanatory titles introduce the restoration before the movie
begins. Rather than having a superimposed subtitle option, viewers can choose
the title cards to be displayed in any one of ten languages. (Egypt’s modern
language of Arabic is one of the choices, but it would have been fun to have an
option for Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic title cards, although that might have
been a bit too esoteric.) The audio recording of the score is excellent,
available in either DTS-HD 5.1 or PCM 2.0 stereo.

There are only a
few bonus features, but they’re all interesting. A 20-page illustrated booklet
in German and English gives a good background on the film. On the disc a
fascinating half-hour documentary (in German with English subtitles) recounts
the film’s rediscovery and reconstruction, demonstrating just how incredible
the final picture quality turned out, compared to the heavily damaged and
poorly duplicated film elements previously available. There is also a
full-length HD video recording of the orchestra doing a live performance of the
score for an audience (from Sept. 14-15, 2011), which is very enjoyable in its
own right with occasional cuts to the movie playing on the screen in the
background to remind you where the storyline is, although the director doesn’t
always cut to the instruments being featured at any given time (he gets better
towards the end). In addition there is a brief trailer promoting the
restoration’s 2011 re-premiere in Hollywood, a gallery of stills, and page
scans of the film’s original program booklet.

THE LOVES OF
PHARAOH on Blu-ray –

Movie:
B+/Video: A-/Audio: A+/Extras: B-

M (1931)

German director Fritz Lang fled
Nazi Germany for Hollywood in the 1930s, where he made mostly modest-budget
crime dramas over the next two decades, including film noir masterpieces like Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Clash
by Night, The Big Heat, and others. The highest achievements of his career,
however, he created during his German period, films such as his massive
two-part national folk epic The Niebelungen (1924), his visionary science-fiction
allegory Metropolis (1926), and his
first sound film, the proto-noir study of the search for a serial killer, M (1931).

M, newly released to BluRay in May 2010
by the Criterion Collection, has long been a favorite for film textbooks to
illustrate the innovative use of sound (and lack of it) to complement the
visuals artistically and symbolically rather than simply to record what is
happening. Many scenes use off-screen sounds to enlarge the screen space in the
mind of the viewer. Others use only limited or no sound effects at all instead
of a modern-style multi-layered effects track. Lang reasoned that when were concentrating on something we mentally block out all
other sounds, and designed his first soundtrack accordingly.

The film’s plot, inspired by
recent headlines in Germany about a child-molester terrorizing the city until
he was finally caught and executed, and its themes have an eerily modern edge
despite the 1931 setting. Lang presents an almost documentary-like chronicle of
the events unfolding, rather than creating mystery or suspense. The
child-killer (Peter Lorre in his first and star-making screen role) is revealed
early on, appearing first as a shadow against a wanted poster as he talks to a
little girl. The police, and then members of the underworld (some played by
real-life criminals) frantically try to identify and locate the killer, the
police to restore peace of mind to the population, the criminals to remove the
reason for the increased police activity that’s now objectionably intruding
into their way of life. Lang’s heavily detailed storytelling does tend to drag
things out longer than they need to be, especially in this restored 110-minute
edition, but his striking visual sense, interesting use of sound, and his
underlying sociopolitical subtext keep the film interesting.

For decades M has only been available in a shortened 99-minute version, mostly
in murky copies of copies. In the early 1990s, the film was restored to the
110-minute running time (it had been 117 minutes at its premiere), but using a
variety of sources that were not all in the best of condition. Shortly after
that version came out on DVD, the original camera negative was rediscovered
(although well-worn and missing a reel) and yet another restoration was done.
That is what can now be seen with incredible clarity on Criterion’s BluRay edition. The worst occurrences of scratches, dirt,
and picture damage have been digitally removed, but some does still remain so
as not to obliterate the film grain and image integrity.

The picture overall looks
amazing, and the audio sounds fairly good for such early optical sound
recording technology. As usual, Criterion has included an excellent group of
bonus feature, including an illustrated 36-page booklet, a fine, insightful
audio commentary by two scholars, a fascinating 50-minute interview with Fritz
Lang filmed in the 1970s by director William Friedkin,
a recent hi-def video interview with the son of the
producer, a 25-minute series of film clips accompanied by classroom discussions
by the films editor, a short remake of M
made by French director Claude Chabrol as an homage,
a very interesting documentary on the history of M from its production through various revised versions and the new
restoration (including clips from the French-language version produced at the
same time), as well as a gallery of numerous high resolution production photos,
sketches, and advertising materials.

But that’s not all. Criterion’s
disc also includes the full-length and newly discovered English language
version of the film, part of which had been dubbed and part of which had been
reshot with English speaking actors and the talented Lorre delivering his
climactic monologue in English (as he had in French for the French version).
This version looks nowhere near as sharp as the original German version, and appears
more like the previous film and video editions available of the German version.
However, the 92-minute running time and some different editing choices keep the
pacing of the English version much brisker and more energetic (albeit at the
sacrifice of eliminating some very nice character bits and visual atmosphere).
Like the French version, it also tags on a more upbeat ending of children
playing happily after the ultimate trial scene, and omits the sobering plea of
the victims’ mothers for audience members to take better precautions for their
children’s safety.

Fritz Lang’s M had and continues to have a lasting influence on crime films made
ever since it was released. Every student of film needs to see it at least
once, and many will want to revisit it or study it in greater depth with
Criterion’s first-rate BluRay edition.

M on BluRay:

Movie: A- / Video: A- / Audio: A- / Extras: A+

MAD DETECTIVE (2007)

Mad Detective (2007), directed by Johnnie To and WaiKa Fai, was a smash hit in
Hong Kong, played at film festivals around the world, but had a disastrous U.S.
release in just one New York theatre for two weeks in July of 2008. Its only available on video as an imported DVD through
Amazon (at about $25), but can be bought on BluRay
direct from Amazon.co.uk for only about $20 plus shipping.

Mad Detective at first glance may seem more accessible to western
audiences, with a standard and often violent murder mystery formula of police
partners investigating what may be internal department corruption. However,
Johnnie To and WaiKa Fai
give it so many off-beat twists and layers of plot that it may easily take
multiple viewings to figure out all that is going on. In fact the audience
response for its abortive American theatrical release gave it only 16.6.% combined A and B rating, and a 75% F rating.

A Hong Kong detective has the
unique ability to see the other sides to people’s personalities as individual
people, which helps him solve tough crimes but ultimately drives him insane. To’s style involves constantly
shifting points of view between the insane title character and his partner, so
it takes a while before the viewer can recognize whats
really happening and what is only in the mind of the disturbed Detective Bun.
His former partner decides to ask this mad detective for help on his latest
case, leading to a fast-moving but odd, complex, and very intriguing plot for
those who can follow it.

The Eureka BluRay
looks very good and has a fine soundtrack with the original Chinese dialogue
and optional English subtitles. It has a few bonus features, including
interviews with the director and cast members shot at various European film
festivals, the original U.K. trailer, and a 16-page booklet with an excellent
analytical essay by Wisconsin film professor David Bordwell.

MAD DETECTIVE on BluRay:

Movie: A / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B

MAN-TRAP (1961)93m***

Absolutely no relation to the
classic Clara Bow silent, this Man-Trap
is a tightly-scripted, slickly-made, and well-acted heist thriller based on a
1952 hardboiled pulp novel by John D. McDonald. It was made just after the
heyday of film noir but retains many aspects of the genre, chronicling the
seedy and decadent suburban life in L.A., working both the Korean War and a Latin
American revolution into the plot, and shot in expressive black-and-white but
utilizing a wide Panavision image. It’s the second of only two films directed
by Edmond O’Brien, better-known as an actor in the noir classic D.O.A. and others. Jeffrey Hunter stars
as the troubled protagonist talked into helping an old war buddy (David
Janssen) steal a $4 million mob payoff up in San Francisco. Of course things
don’t go exactly as planned. In the classic film noir era of the 40s and early
50s, the leads might have been given more edge by the likes of Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan, Alan Ladd, Dick Powell, or Sterling
Hayden, among others, but Hunter and Janssen do just fine in the more modern
60s milieu. Especially impressive is Stella Stevens’ wild yet sensitive
performance as Hunter’s promiscuous, alcoholic, heiress wife, among the best
roles of her career. Her character and various subplots would likely have been
toned down drastically had the film been made just a few years earlier.

The plot begins during the Korean
War, showing a small battle in which Hunter saves Janssen’s life but is then
badly wounded, with Janssen in return saving him. The action then picks up
nearly a decade later with Hunter as a dissatisfied building contractor working
for his rather shady father-in-law, dealing with his beautiful but severely
troubled wife, and hating the middle-class superficiality and moral decadence
of his neighbors (one of whom is played by Bob Crane). One day Janssen shows up
after having worked inside a Central American dictatorship under an alias,
explaining a sure-fire plan on how to earn a quick million, that is actually
money intended for illegal arms smuggling, money being tracked by the
revolutionaries who will stop at nothing for their cause. Except for a few
nighttime scenes, the picture is brighter than most noir films, but
nevertheless incorporates the oppressive sense of doom and several cynically
ironic plot twists. Overall it’s quite an interesting social commentary coming
from early 1960s Hollywood, besides being a reasonably effective crime thriller
and unexpectedly biting domestic melodrama. If it's no Touch of Evil or Out of the
Past, it's got enough going on to stand on its own.

Picture quality is beautiful on Olive’s
Blu-ray of this Paramount Picture, with lots of fine details and textures
visible, and the mono sound is decent. As usual for Olive, there are no bonus
features beyond a main and chapter menu.

MAN-TRAP on Blu-ray –

Movie: B+/Video: A/Audio: A-/Extras: F

THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH (1959)

This Hammer production, released by Paramount in the U.S., is a nice
low-key amalgam of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,”
“Jack the Ripper,” “Mystery of the Wax Museum,” and “Murders in the Rue
Morgue,” among other horror classics. Set in late 19th-century Paris, the
familiar plot elements are an earnest pastiche, however, and the
occasionally-talky dialogue is unexpectedly literate at times, betraying its
stage origin. Still, the strong cast led by Anton Diffring,
Hazel Court, and Christopher Lee and good direction by Terence Fisher keep it
from becoming stale. Genre fans should find it well worth their while and a
good companion to its co-feature in the same box, The Skull (see below).

The 1.66:1 high-def transfer for Legend’s
Blu-ray is very good, although it seems just a bit softer than it might be, and
what looks like grain may sometimes be a slight bit of video noise. The British
Technicolor photography comes through well, and is effectively used. The audio
is good but has some faint surface noise. The only extras are a main menu and chapter
stops.

THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH
on Blu-ray

Movie: B / Video: A- / Audio: A- / Extras: F

MIDNIGHT MOVIE (2008)

Low-budget independent filmmakers
often choose the horror genre, partly because the required special effects are
not as elaborate, numerous, or pricey as for Hollywood epics, but largely
because there always seems to be a built-in fan base for thrills and/or
gruesomely bloody effects. Midnight Movie
and Killer Movie, two films from 2008
that follow the standard slasher formula with varying
success, came out on BluRay individually in October
2009, and have been packaged together as a bargain double-feature. Distributed
by the small label Phase 4 Films, both discs boast fine HD transfers, but both
unfortunately have very awkward menu interfaces. Nevertheless, horror fans will
want them for sure, and others may still find them worth taking a look at.

Midnight Movie has an irresistible premise for old movie buffs and
for anyone who has worked in a movie theatre. A writer-director-star of a 1969
cult horror film went insane shortly after its release, and decades later
disappeared after a bloody massacre at the mental hospital where he was
institutionalized. Now a rundown old movie house has planned a midnight show
that’s the first screening of his infamous film in almost 40 years.

The tiny audience is joined by a
persistent detective and psychiatrist who both fear and hope that the missing
lunatic will make an appearance. Needless to say, after the killings begin on
screen, the audience members and theatre employees soon start disappearing. The
innovative twist in Midnight Movie is
that they don’t just get slaughtered by a madman in the theatre. Instead, they
somehow find themselves in the movie itself, tracked and killed by the movie’s
villain on the screen as their friends watch helplessly from their theatre
seats.

Midnight Movie has reasonably believable acting, some effective
thrills, and won Best Feature and Best Cinematography at the 2008 Chicago
Horror Film Festival. It starts out very promisingly as it sets up the
characters and situation, but as things develop, the supernatural element moves
from cool and spooky to incoherent. It never is fully explained, and ultimately
things start to happen that simply don’t make enough sense, even for a fantasy
like this. The film also descends for several minutes into a more extreme form
of gore-porn that clashes uncomfortably with what we’ve been watching to that
point.

Another strike against it that
will be spotted immediately by anyone who’s seen a projection booth, is that
the film-within-the film is being run from a single 20-minute reel on a
portable projector instead of from multiple reels on a pair of theatre
projectors or from the more likely platter system. The film used as a prop is
also obviously modern film stock with digital sound plus a cyan analog
soundtrack, which were not in use when it was supposedly produced. (At least
it’s 35mm film!)

While Midnight Movie moves along briskly in only 80 minutes of running
time, and has some nice character touches, it would have benefited from some
additional trimming and especially from more rewrites of the last half hour.

There are several interesting
behind-the scenes featurettes, deleted footage,
outtakes, and trailers as bonus items, all standard definition. Though the box
claims there’s a director’s commentary, there is none on the disc.

MIDNIGHT MOVIE on BluRay:

Movie: C+ / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B-

THE MIKADO (1939)

Among the many
audience and performer favorites for high school and college musical
productions are the comic operettas by the nineteenth-century team of W. S.
Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. Their biggest hit, “The Mikado,” remains a
perennial of drama departments, music departments, and amateur theatre groups
ever since its stage premiere in 1885 by the D’Oyly
Carte Opera Company.

The first movie
version of any Gilbert and Sullivan shows finally happened with 1939’s “The
Mikado,” filmed in England by American director Victor Schertziger
with the participation of the D’Oyly Carte company. Sixty years later, British director Mike Leigh
wanted to do a film about the general process of artistic creativity, and
decided to dramatize specifically how Gilbert and Sullivan came to write and
stage “The Mikado” in his 1999 film “Topsy-Turvy.” The Criterion Collection has
released both “The Mikado” (1939) and “Topsy-Turvy” (1999) to Blu-ray.

“The Mikado,” like
all Gilbert and Sullivan, is a light-hearted and literate satire of British
manners, society, and politics, marked by delightfully silly romantic plots,
naïve and pompous characters, and incredibly catchy tunes. This time the
quintessentially British story was disguised as a stylized fantasy version of
feudal Japan, but with scrupulously accurate costuming. World trade with Japan had
only recently opened up and the show helped create an international craze for
things Japanese.

American pop singer
Kenny Baker does a decent job as the emperor’s son trying to escape an arranged
marriage and pretending to be a wandering minstrel, who falls in love with the
fiancée of the Lord High Executioner. D’Oyly Carte
veterans Martyn Green and Sydney Granville are
naturally solid in the key roles of Koko and Pooh-Bah, and the rest of the cast
is quite good as well. The show is slightly shortened for the film version
(reducing much of Katisha’s singing and bantering),
but plays just fine with a nice pantomimed prologue setting up the plot to the
strains of the orchestra (which often has a livelier tempo than some stage
productions).

The Blu-ray’s high-definition,
film-like picture transfer is superb, showing off the delicate British-style
pastel approach to Technicolor that fits this story so beautifully. A few very
brief color fluctuations are excusable as inherent in the original. The audio
is quite crisp and clear but has a more pronounced "boxiness"
than many 1939-era films and a low but constant layer of background audio noise
inherent in old optical elements, not quite as cleaned-up as some of the other
1930s films on Blu-ray. It's preferable to hear them the way they are, however,
rather than have too much tampering that might damage the sound. It's still a
decent audio transfer.

As usual, Criterion
includes several worthwhile bonus features. Although there’s no audio
commentary, there are high-definition presentations of a deleted scene (with
the topical “little list” song), new interviews with “Mikado” experts
(including Mike Leigh), and a 1926 silent but color-tinted promotional film
made for the D’Oyly Carte’s stage production, plus
fascinating all-too-brief audio excerpts from 1939 radio broadcasts of two
different all-black Broadway productions, “The Hot Mikado” and “The Swing
Mikado,” and also an illustrated booklet.

THE MIKADO on Blu-ray

Movie: A- / Video: A+ / Sound: B+ / Extras: B+

THE MISFITS (1961)

Perhaps
most famous as the final film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, John
Huston’s “The Misfits” can stand on its own as a poignant character drama about
the conflict between ideals and reality, about memories of the past and hopes
for the future while struggling to survive in changing times. Arthur Miller’s
script is a thoughtful exploration of a variety of always-timely personal
issues. His dialogue takes on an even more touching tone with the knowledge
that both Gable and Monroe would soon be dead and that Clift would die only
five years later at age 45.

Gable’s
fatal heart-attack at only 59, before “The Misfits” was even released, was
likely due to the strain of performing his own stuntwork
in this film. Ironically, except for the rodeo and the climactic
horse-capturing sequence, the film is largely dialogue-driven with little
physical action. Gable gives one of the best performances of his career as the
stubbornly free-spirited modern cowboy whose ideas and rough edges soften after
meeting a beautiful but sad young divorcee. He brings a believable complexity
and growth to the sometimes paradoxical character.

As the
philosophical and emotionally sensitive ex-stripper, Monroe demonstrates that
she could be a powerful dramatic actress, and not just a ditzy sex goddess in
light romantic comedies. Monroe died at 36 halfway through filming “Something’s
Gotta Give” in 1962, yet another sex comedy but one
with a more mature edge to her character.

Eli
Wallach and Montgomery Clift also are memorable as Gable’s old sidekick and a
reckless rodeo competitor, each with his own troubled past,
and character actress Thelma Ritter lends her typically lovable cynic to the
mix.

The
Blu-ray has a fine high-definition 1.66:1 transfer of Russell Metty’s stark black and white cinematography and a good
mono soundtrack. The bare-bones disc has no bonus features except the original
trailer (in high-def), chapter stops, alternate dubs
in six other languages, and optional subtitles in eight languages including
English. Like other recent MGM discs, there is no main menu, and all features
must be accessed through a popup menu while the movie is running.

THE MISFITS on
Blu-ray

Movie:A / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: F+

THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932) 63m*** ½

This classic pre-code
adventure filmed on the sets of KING KONG with some of the same cast and music
composer (Max Steiner) remains the definitive version of the story about a
sadistic madman with refined tastes, who hunts humans for pleasure on his
remote jungle island. Joel McCrea and Fay Wray star with Robert Armstrong
opposite villain Leslie Banks and henchman Noble Johnson. Banks revels in the
high melodrama and milks his scenes for all he can get out of them. The story
appears to start out slowly on board a ship, suddenly picking up at the time of
the shipwreck, and then slowing down again at the island castle until the evil
Count Zaroff (Banks) reveals his “game” and its
stakes. From then on it’s action-packed all the way,
with Steiner providing one of the best scores of his career to intensify the
action.

Most people have
probably seen this, very likely on one of the many cheap Public Domain copies
around, or Criterion’s pretty-good DVD, but Flicker Alley’s Blu-ray is now the
definitive edition to watch. Picture quality is overall quite good on this HD
transfer from a 35mm finegrain, and with a projector it’s
nice to notice that the entire frame area has been recorded but with no
window-boxing (so on a big screen you might actually want to zoom out the
picture or pull in the masking to cover a half-inch or so all around). Clarity
and contrast are excellent with very little visible wear. The shark attack is
printed as a positive as originally intended. The image often seems just a hair
soft, but is still better than Criterion’s DVD (and without the digital
compression artifacts), and it’s also not as grainy as the Warner Blu-ray of
KING KONG (which was apparently a generation or two further removed from the
camera negative). Some faint jitter in the film gate can be noticed in the
closing credits. The PCM lossless audio quality is decent considering the age
of the film, comparable to that on KONG and drastically better than the
soundtrack on Kino’s otherwise nice-looking Blu-ray of BIRD OF PARADISE from
the same studio the same year. Bonus materials include a worthwhile commentary
that complements Criterion’s commentary while repeating some of the same
information, an audio interview with producer Merian
C. Cooper accompanied by still photos on the disc, and a brief statement by
Cooper in the enclosed pamphlet, which also contains production credits.

THE MOST
DANGEROUS GAME on Blu-ray --

Movie:
A/Video: A-/Audio: A-/Extras: B-

MY WIFE’S LODGER (1952)

The second feature on the British
Film Institute’s volume 2 of Adelphi films (with “Is Your Honeymoon Really Nessessary”), Maurice Elvey’s “My
Wife's Lodger” (1952) is a very British film that’s a wry comic variation on
some of the working-class themes treated much more seriously in any number of
dramatic films. Its approach to family strife is also strongly reminiscent of
material handled by W. C. Fields. It follows the adventures of a hapless
middle-aged WWII veteran who returns home to find his children now
independent-minded teens and his always-critical wife apparently enthralled by
the smarmy lodger (named Roger) who now shares their house.

Dors
lights up the screen in the supporting role of the daughter, but the film
really belongs to writer-star Dominic Roche, who based most of his career on
his "Willie Higgenbottom" persona. It’s
often a surprisingly dark situation comedy, but various plot developments
gradually build to an appropriate climax and a rather unexpected resolution. Dors even gets to sing near the end.

Picture quality is very good and
sound quality is fine for its era. Like the other films in the BFI’s Adelphi
Collection, the only bonus (besides a main menu and chapter stops) is a nice
illustrated booklet with photos and background on both films included on the
disc.

MY WIFE'S LODGER on Blu-ray:

Movie:B/Video: A/Audio: A-/Extras: D+

THE NAKED KISS (1964)

Samuel Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss”
gets off to a rousing start with a subjective hand-held camera switching
viewpoints back and forth as a prostitute is beating up her crooked pimp.
Constance Towers stars as a high-class prostitute who moves to a small town and
decides to start a new life for herself, getting a job taking care of crippled
children at a local medical center instead moving into the brothel across the
river. The cynical local cop (Anthony Eisley)
questions her motives, especially when she falls for the rich playboy who is
the town’s financial benefactor (Michael Dante), but she persists and even
helps disillusioned young nurse friends avoid taking up her former career. Of
course, unexpected complications suddenly change the direction of the plot
completely for its final act when she’s arrested for murder.

Throughout “The Naked Kiss” there
is a stronger literary sense, with a variety of allusions to classical
literature and music, as well as occasional in-jokes referencing Fuller’s own
previous work (including “Shock Corridor”). The story is in some ways more
conventional than “Shock Corridor” but is perhaps even more powerful in
exploring its characters’ confrontation with narrow-minded prejudice and
preconceived conclusions from “respectable” citizens. Towers’ fine performance,
a complex interpretation by Eisley, and brief but
solid supporting roles by Hollywood veterans Patsy Kelly, Betty Bronson, and
Virginia Grey do much to give the film a depth beyond a simple noir melodrama
or the more obvious thrills and social commentary of “Shock Corridor.” The
layers of plot and character are far richer than the drive-in or grindhouse
fare that its trailer implies. And despite the sometimes brutal rawness of the
story material, Fuller manages to keep the language within the genteel
standards of the early 1960s.

Both films have excellent
hi-definition transfers with strong mono audio. Unfortunately neither has an
audio commentary, but each includes a roughly 30-page illustrated booklet with
a critical essay and excerpts from Fuller’s autobiography. Each disc also has
an interesting (though standard-def) half-hour interview
with Towers about the particular film, plus a hi-def
trailer for the film. “Shock Corridor” includes a good hour-long documentary
about Fuller, whereas “The Naked Kiss” has over an hour’s worth of extracts
from three interviews with Fuller made for European television.

THE NAKED KISS on Blu-ray

Movie: A / Video: A+ /
Audio: A / Extras: B

OUR HOSPITALITY (1923)

“Our Hospitality” shows Keaton’s
early skill at constructing a solid story around which to develop comic gags
and episodes, instead of the other way around as many other movie comics then
worked. It could easily be a serious melodrama, with a young man traveling west
by train in 1830 to claim inherited property only to find himself in the middle
of a generations-old family feud with the father and brothers of his new
girlfriend. Keaton plays some sections of the film straight, undermines the
seriousness at other times with his typically dry humor, and occasionally
throws in moments of broader slapstick that usually involve elaborate, often
dangerous physical stunts.

Much of the humor deals with the
contrast between its early American time period and modern-day “roaring 20s”
attitudes. A fascinating element of “Our Hospitality” is how many comic episodes
involving the film’s quaintly primitive train are dry runs for “The General,”
which he’d film three years later. Just as fascinating is one of the disc’s
bonus features: a recently discovered early cut of the film entitled simply
“Hospitality.” While there are no alternate scenes, this version runs 25
minutes shorter and concentrates on the plot structure rather than the comedy,
re-arranging the film’s prologue so that it appears as a flashback about nine
minutes into the film.

Kino’s “Our Hospitality” has a very
fine HD transfer to Blu-ray, if not quite as spectacular as “The General” or
“Sherlock Jr.” transfers. The slightly lower visual quality is partly because
the print displays more wear on the original negative in the form of dirt and
light white scratches, but also because it is just a tiny bit less sharp than
those other two films even though the film grain is still apparent. The audio
includes a choice between two different music accompaniments, a wonderful 5.1
DTS-HD full orchestra score composed by Carl Davis, fitting the action quite
closely, and a nice bouncy small-orchestra score compiled about 15 years ago by
Donald Hunsberger using period music that might have
been played when the film was first shown, recorded in 2.0 stereo.

There is a decent though not
extensive selection of bonus features. Most notable is the alternate cut, which
unfortunately survived only in a poor quality 16mm copy made from an
already-decomposing nitrate print. A highly enjoyable bonus short is “The Iron
Mule,” a 19-minute short made in 1925 using the same train Keaton had built for
“Our Hospitality.” Keaton even does some uncredited
bit parts in the Al St. John comedy directed by his friend Roscoe Arbuckle.
There’s also an informative new 26-minute documentary on Keaton’s shift from
shorts to features and the making of “Our Hospitality,” as well as a selection
of 64 rare behind-the-scenes photos in two well-organized galleries that allow
direct access instead of merely clicking through each picture.

OUR HOSPITALITY on
Blu-ray

Movie:
A / Video: A- / Audio: A+ / Extras: B

OUTLAND (1981)109m***

When director
Peter Hyams wanted to make a Western, the genre was
no longer fashionable, and Hollywood studios were reluctant to finance a
Western when modern crime stories and science fiction seemed more profitable.
As a result, Hyams wrote his next script to appear on
the surface as a sci-fi thriller, and filmed it to look like a film noir murder-mystery
about high-level crime coverups, but in actuality it
was a parable about contemporary corporate greed with the last half becoming a
fairly close remake of High Noon. The
film’s original title of Io (the moon
of Jupiter where it’s set, pronounced “Eye-Oh”) being
rejected because executives kept reading it as “Ten.”

Sean Connery
plays a marshal assigned to head security at a remote mining colony on a moon
of Jupiter. When he arrives he learns there has been a series of mysterious
deaths that no one wants him to investigate. Once he’s able to trace the deaths
to drug use with the help of the local doctor (Frances Sternhagen),
and then discovers high-level involvement, he finds himself on a hit list with
hired assassins on their way to make sure his meddling is permanently stopped.
Just as in High Noon, he is unable to
find allies to face these killers. Of course he must confront them on his own
and a suspenseful game of cat-and-mouse plays out in the exotic sci-fi environment
(nicely shot in widescreen), again predictable in many ways but also
incorporating several surprises.

Picture quality
on Warner Brothers’ Blu-ray is better than the old DVD, but still a
disappointment. The film is intentionally dark to begin with, pointing up the
grimy, sordid life led by the rough miners, but in this copy many of the
shadows have a muddy contrast that loses detail. Brighter scenes generally fare
better, especially near the beginning and end of the film, but the film also
suffers from a slight soft-focus problem throughout most of the middle hour or
so, as if the anamorphic CinemaScope lens wasn’t completely focused when it was
copied. Audio, on the other hand, is excellent, with good stereo and wide range
of frequency and dynamics. Bonus features are limited to a trailer (in SD) and
a director commentary.

OUTLAND on Blu-ray –

Movie:
A-/Video: B/Audio: A/Extras: C+

THE PINK PANTHER (1964)

“The Pink Panther” (1964)is certainly one of
the high points of Blake Edwards' directorial career. It’s a brilliant
demonstration of how to stage action for the wide CinemaScope (actually Technirama in this case) aspect ratio, a leisurely but
often hilarious heist comedy, and a valuable artifact of 1960s culture.

Peter Sellers
certainly made Clouseau an iconic character in a way
that Peter Ustinov, originally intended for the role, probably wouldn't have,
although in this first of the series it's easy to imagine Ustinov doing most of
the same lines and sight gags. David Niven is his
usual suave self, and his Raffles-like jewel thief is actually the main
character of this film. While a fun film, I still prefer the first sequel, “A
Shot In The Dark,” and hope that one makes it to BluRay
soon and in as high a quality as this edition.

Picture quality is
absolutely stunning on this (the horizontal Technirama
negative giving a double-size image area), with the original film grain
comparable to 70mm of its era and modern fine-grain 35mm, all of it nicely
preserved in this beautiful transfer. The soundtrack is available in its
original mono or remixed for 5.1 DTS Master Audio with nice stereo reproduction
of the excellent Henry Mancini score and a few directional sound effects.

There's a very
interesting commentary track by Blake Edwards, giving behind the scenes
background and such unexpected information as the fact that Claudia Cardinale's voice was entirely dubbed by someone else (with
a similar voice quality) since she did not yet speak English well enough. There
are also some fairly interesting featurettes.

European distributors continue to
release interesting foreign and American classics to BluRay
that are unavailable in the U.S., some unfortunately region-locked for European
players, but quite a few that are either combined region A and B or region-free
that will play anywhere.

I received the new
Eureka region-free BluRay ofPrince Valiant (1954) just in time so I
could watch it on my birthday. The BluRay format
currently has so few films made before 1970, and
especially before 1960, that I couldn’t resist ordering it the week it came
out. Interestingly, except for a mediocre release of the original Japanese cut
of Godzilla, by May 2010 the only
films from 1954 on BluRay had to be ordered from
Britain, even though they're American productions. And the only way to insure
that classic, foreign, and independent films continue to receive BluRay releases is to buy those that are released. The
first US BluRay of an American film from 1954 was the
June 2010 release of Warner Brothers restoration of the Judy Garland version of
A Star Is Born, but several more have
come out since then, including White
Christmas, Romeo and Juliet, Vera Cruz, and The Egyptian..

Prince Valiant
is a medieval costume movie that’s definitely juvenile adventure formula fluff,
but is much better than I expected, and a bit better both dramatically and in
production values than The Black Shield
of Falworth(1954), which came out on BluRay in England late in 2009.

The cast and
credits of Prince Valiant are
first-rate, with a script by Dudley Nichols, Henry Hathaway directing, fine
CinemaScope cinematography by Lucien Ballard, and a rousing score by Franz
Waxman. James Mason has fun as the shady Sir Brack,
Robert Wagner is earnest in his first starring role as "Val" the
title character, Janet Leigh and Debra Paget don't have a lot to do but are
nice to look at, Sterling Hayden is rather campy as Sir Gawain, Victor McLaglen is a lot of fun as the rambunctious Viking Boltar, and the other leads are well-rounded out by Hollywood
veterans Donald Crisp as King Aguar and Brian Aherne as King Arthur.

Fox obviously put a
lot of effort and talent into what's really a glorified kiddie show for
Saturday matinees, but what's also an obvious attempt to sell the studios new
miracle of CinemaScope (you see it without special glasses) and "the
wonder of stereophonic sound." In fact the trailer stresses those elements
repeatedly and to amusing excess.

The plot is based
on the newspaper comic strip, about an exiled Christian Viking king and his
family given protection by the Christian King Arthur. Naturally the pagan
Vikings now in power try to hunt them down, while one of Arthur’s knights is
secretly plotting to overthrow his throne, the Black Knight terrorizes the
land, and the Viking prince (Valiant) begs to train to become a knight of the
round table. (We can only hope that Monty
Python and the Holy Grail gets to BluRay soon!)
There are also the usual romantic subplots fraught with rivalries and
misunderstandings.

The BluRay of Prince Valiant
is a lovely transfer overall, with just a little side-to-side weave showing up,
especially in the beginning. A number of on-line reviews have warned about
disappointingly erratic picture quality. However, it's quite obvious from what
they say that they're simply not familiar with the technological artifacts
inherent in optical printing or aging color film, as the only noticeable color
shifts are during dissolves and a few optical effects.

This is a byproduct
of splicing in opticals from a dupe negative between the scenes printed
directly from the original negative. In other words, it might have looked more
consistent in 1954 but that's the way it would look on any new theatrical
print, as the film stock used for effects usually fades faster than the
original negative. The print is incredibly sharp throughout most of it (again
softer in the dissolves and a bit soft in the opening credits), and it looks
beautiful projected to eight feet wide in its original 2.55 to 1 aspect ratio.

This BluRay does include the stereophonic sound, but only in a
2.0 version rather than the 3.0 or 4.0 that I would have expected. It's also a
bit weak on the low frequency response, sounding a bit tinny when running with
normal default settings, but by turning up my amplifier's bass control to +10
(I normally keep it set at 0 or +2), it sounded much more natural. Even with
only right and left channels and no center channel, the stereo was quite nice
throughout, with good fullness to the music. Typical of early stereo sound films
but less common today, quite a few scenes have very directional dialogue (one
person on each edge of the screen and the sound coming from the appropriate
speaker), and a few have sound effects panning across the screen to follow the
action.

Sadly there are no
bonus features other than the original theatrical trailer, and that is only
standard-definition. Still, Prince
Valiant is a fun movie that looks great and is worth getting for any fans of
medieval adventures or 1950s early widescreen films, especially when it's only
about $16 plus shipping to order it from the U.K. Not only that, but my order
from amazon.co.uk arrived just five days after placing it with the normal
shipping option -- roughly $12, or an extra $2 per movie since I ordered six at
a time.

PRINCE VALIANT on BluRay:

Movie: B+ Video: A- Audio: B+ Extras: D

RAN (1985) 162m*** ½

Akira Kurosawa's
reworking of Shakespeare's "King Lear" into a tragic epic of feudal
Japan starts a bit slowly in its setup but soon becomes an incredibly powerful
study of human nature, sibling rivalry, family loyalty, the fragility of the
mind, and the inevitability of war as basic to the human condition. Actors'
performances, staging of actors and large groups of extras, uses of color,
music and sound, all are outstanding. There are long segments with no dialogue, and at least one long lyrical battle sequence with
music only and no sound effects until a key moment. Ran (which is Japanese for "chaos") is the elderly
Kurosawa's late-career masterwork, as good as or better than Kagemusha from
five years earlier.

Sadly, the
supposedly "HD" transfer from Studio Canal on the Lionsgate
Blu-ray is a bitter disappointment, looking mostly like an upscaled
DVD, and very often worse than a good DVD as far as image sharpness and overuse
of edge-enhancement. The movie is so engrossing that the very soft to softish picture quality seems to get better as it goes
along (or maybe it actually does get slightly better in some scenes), but the
crispness of fine details and textures that is the selling-point of Blu-ray in
the first place is completely missing. It's certainly watchable, possibly even
impressive (thanks to its vivid colors) on a small TV set, or maybe from the
back row of a home theatre, but then so is a standard DVD. The lossless DTS-HD
5.1 stereo soundtrack, on the other hand, is very good. While there's no audio
commentary, there is a decent selection of bonus features including four
documentaries running about 40-70 minutes each and a trailer, although all in
standard-definition and in French with English subtitles, plus a
Criterion-style booklet with a nice essay about the film and several fuzzy
color production stills.

If you can find
this used or on sale for under $10 it might be worth it, simply because the
movie itself is so outstanding, but Studio Canal's mediocre picture quality
makes the Lionsgate Blu-ray something to avoid at its
regular price of over $20. (And Lionsgate's Blu-ray
of the Studio Canal transfer of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt is even worse, with horrible color and some shots that
look like non-upscaled VHS bootlegs! The now
out-of-print Criterion DVD looks drastically better than Lionsgate's
Blu-ray in that case and in the case of Ran
Criterion's old DVD probably looks at least as good.)

RAN on Blu-ray --

Movie:
A/Video: C+/Audio: A/Extras: B+

REPULSION (1965)

Polish-born director Roman
Polanski is best-remembered today for Rosemary’s
Baby and Chinatown and for a
controversial personal life that led to his fleeing the United States, but his
fifty-year filmmaking career includes a variety of interesting and off-beat
works. After an impressive feature-film debut in his native Poland with Knife in the Water, his first
English-language feature was the low-budget but groundbreaking British
production, Repulsion, which came out
on BluRay in 2009 from Criterion.

Repulsion (1965) is a dark psychological thriller that is sometimes
labeled as a horror film and often compared with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. French actress Catherine Deneuve is excellent in one of her first screen roles, the
beautiful but disturbed young manicurist who gradually loses her sanity.
Polanski takes his time building up her character, skillfully getting the
audience to see the world more and more through her eyes as the film goes on,
yet always keeping a sense of cool detachment that parallels her own
relationship to the real world.

The BluRay
disc has a beautifully sharp transfer, preserving the films
original 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio as well as its effective use of film grain and
blend of scenes with both low and high contrasts. There is an audio commentary
with both Polanski and Deneuve (recorded 15 years ago
individually, not together) recalling the films production and giving insights
into the story and character. Besides original theatrical trailers, the disc
also has a very good and relatively recent (2003) British documentary on the
making of the film, as well as a fascinating 1964 French TV documentary filmed
on the set during its production. In the box is a 16-page pamphlet with an
essay by a film scholar and a listing of disc credits.

REPULSION on BluRay:

Movie: B+ / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: A-

ROBOCOP (1987)

Robocop (1987) came to BluRay in 2007.
Another pop cultural classic of its time, Paul Verhoeven’s
sci-fi crime thriller is a darkly satiric vision of the future that holds up
amazingly well on several levels. Its ambivalent depiction of the wonders of
modern technology and computers, of a government-dependent populace addicted to
sexually exploitive TV shows and infotainment newscasts, of corporate greed
disguised as public service, of rampant crime that requires vigilante justice,
remains in step with the likes of Iron
Man, The Dark Knight, and V for
Vendetta. Its implicit fear of technology malfunctions and conflicting
software directives is right out of 2001:
a space odyssey.

Made before the days of CGI, Robocop’s special effects are remarkably
effective, its stop-motion robot miniatures more creepily believable than todays flashy computer-generated variety. And while the
film’s hard-R graphic violence almost received an X rating in 1987, in today’s
context it’s more of a soft R bordering on PG-13.

The BluRay’s
picture quality is generally good, although many of its dark scenes appear to
suffer from digital manipulation that distorts and softens the image with video
noise. The film’s original 1.66:1 picture is cropped here to the more common 1.85
ratio. The audio is excellent, with the original 4-channel stereo track as well
as a remixed 5.1 track. Extras are almost non-existent, however, with only a
trailer (in HD, at least), and trailers to a couple of other films.

ROBOCOP on BluRay

Movie: AVideo: BAudio:
AExtras: D

ROME (2007)

Rome was a
short-lived historical soap opera/proto-mafia melodrama that aired from
2005-2007, set during the last years of the Roman Republic and the first years
of the Roman Empire, the period of Julius Caesar and young Octavius,
later Augustus Caesar. The 22 hour-long episodes of the two seasons come on 10 BluRay discs, containing a modest but interesting selection
of bonus materials, including audio commentaries on 13 of the episodes, nine featurettes, and interactive on-screen background data.
Many of the commentaries are by co-creator and frequent screenwriter Bruno
Heller, often accompanied by co-producer and historical consultant Jonathan
Stamp, and several others are by cast members or directors of various episodes.

The series itself has excellent
production values and acting throughout, its cast led by Ciaran Hinds as
Caesar, Kevin McKidd as Lucius Vorenus,
Ray Stevenson as Titus Pullo, Polly Walker as
Caesar’s niece Atia, and Lindsay Duncan as his
mistress Servilia, mother of Brutus (Tobias Menzies). Noted British filmmaker Michael Apted directed the first three episodes and was a
consulting producer on the first season. Rome
is a much bigger-budget prequel of sorts to the landmark BBC-TV miniseries I, Claudius, and even more explicit in
its depiction of the Romans earthy vulgarity, sexual hang-ups or lack thereof,
nudity, and casual, self-serving violence.

The political machinations, high-level
corruption, and conflicts of idealism with pragmatism are inextricably woven
with the sex lives of the major movers, and the world of ancient Rome is seen
to be not really too far removed from modern politics, if often a bit more
frequently bloody. Likewise the variety of attitudes and
philosophies held by individuals toward their country, their leaders, and their
own lives.

Two soldier
characters (Vorenus and Pullo),
loosely inspired by two actual soldiers known from Caesar’s army, serve to root
the events in the everyday world of common people, instead of focusing only on
the privileged ruling classes the way many historical epics tend to do. Their
stories are beautifully woven into the historical context, helping to mitigate
a number of dramatically effective but historically questionable changes from
surviving ancient records.

And although Rome had a high budget by TV standards, it had nowhere near the
resources of the recent Hollywood blockbusters set in the ancient world. While
there is one well-staged (and very graphic) gladiator fight in a small arena,
and a brief but reasonably effective storm at sea, fans of movies like Gladiator, King Arthur, Alexander, Troy,
and 300 may be disappointed that its
battles and major action scenes are done on a very small scale or more often
conveniently take place between episodes.

The overall historic accuracy may have
flaws but is better than most movies and TV shows of its type, the liberties
with actual events and characters excusable for dramatic effect in the limited
time available to tell the story. Even at 22 hours, much is drastically
condensed, altered, or eliminated, and there are also a number of scenes
setting up events that were originally planned to develop over three more
unproduced seasons.

The show is at its best in the vivid
glimpse it provides into the social structure, customs, concerns, and day to
day life of ancient Rome in the first century B.C., the meticulous art
direction and textures of its scenery, fabric, and flesh made all the more
tangible in the crisp, high-definition image on the BluRay
edition. The picture is so sharp that occasional out-of-focus shots that might
pass unnoticed on a standard definition TV set are now easy to pick out.

Rome the complete
series is a worthwhile addition to any video library, especially in the
beautiful BluRay release. Its $130 list price is
typically discounted to between $80-$90, and has been
as low as $60 from Amazon.

ROME on BluRay

Movie:
A- / Video: A / Audio: A+ / Extras: B+

SANDS OF OBLIVION (2007)

What’s with these BluRays showing up for only like $6.99? Is that a misprint?
Aren’t BluRays normally $15-$20, if not $30 or $40?
And what are some of these titles that budget labels like Anchor Bay are coming
out with, anyway? Many of them, it turns out, are horror thrillers originally
made for TV. Others made it into a few film festivals but never quite got their
hoped-for theatrical releases and went straight to video. Genre pictures can
always sell, and some of them aren’t that bad.

I’d heard of Sands of Oblivion (2007) but never saw
it on the Sci-Fi channel. It came out on BluRay in
December 2009 and has recently shown up on some store shelves. For only $6.99
it was hard to resist after reading the blurb on the back of the box,
explaining how Cecil B. DeMille mysteriously buried
the ancient Egypt sets for his silent film of The Ten Commandments after the production, and now modern
archaeologists trying to dig it up have unleashed a horror that cannot be
stopped.

The good news is, the part of the movie set in 1923 is a lot of fun. The bad
news is, the horror they unleashed is the rest of the
movie, which ranges from adequate to mediocre to not very good at all (and I
actually like that kind of story). Its only 94 minutes
but seems more like two hours.

The movie begins in
ancient Egypt, much like the 1999 Mummy
remake and the moderately diverting 2005 TV movie Curse of King Tut’s Tomb, but here the
acting, production values, and plot points really show their TV budget
cheesiness. Luckily that part is the shortest section of the film.

The next part jumps
to 1923 when Cecil B. DeMille is just finishing his
desert footage for The Ten Commandments.
Dan Castellaneta, better known as the voice of Homer
Simpson, makes a great DeMille, looking vaguely like
him and capturing his vocal inflections perfectly. He's running a bit over
budget, and oops, somebody gets mysteriously killed one night before they're
done.

We can only wish
this sequence had lasted more than a few minutes, because it has the greatest
attention to details and feeling for its period. The film might have been far
more impressive if this part was closer to half the total length instead of
just setting up the intriguing situation before jumping up to the present day,
where it immediately shifts to a distinctively TV movie-of-the-week glorified
prime-time soap feeling.

In the present we
have a Hollywood-attractive archeological team (naturally with the female PhD
in charge wearing a crop-top and short-shorts) racing to dig up the set on the
California beach before shifting tides (due to an oil company, of course) put
that stretch of sand underwater forever.

Meanwhile an Iraq
vet and his elderly grandfather are trying to locate an Egyptian-themed time
capsule the old man had buried as a child on DeMille’s
set. And the egotistic and adulterous soon-to-be-ex-husband of the excavation
team leader is a noted Egyptologist who insists on getting involved in the dig
when some of the artifacts they unearth appear to be authentic ancient Egyptian
rather than Hollywood imitations.

Naturally,
something happens that accidentally lets loose a murderous ancient spirit that
starts killing off people until they can no longer pass it off as tragic
coincidence. And then it devolves into even more routine and painfully slow
formula horror thriller mode through the inevitable end. At least there’s an
innovatively interesting CGI fight scene near the end, where the paintings come
off the wall (as flat, paperdoll-like people) to
fight the hero.

The script sets up
some nice premises and periodically attempts to flesh out characters beyond the
usual flat caricatures, and works in a few fun old-movie references, but the
directing is so pedestrian that we're just waiting for the next thing to
happen.

The acting overall
(Castellaneta and a few others in the 1923 segment
excepted) is not even up to most TV movies or soap operas, and looks more like
something from a no-budget indie film (and I ought to know!). MorenaBaccarin is passable most
of the time as the too-beautiful archaeologist, but Adam Baldwin is simply
awful as her husband and Victor Webster as the Iraq vet looks like he wishes he
were in a better film most of the time. Even poor George Kennedy looks like
he's walking through his part as the grandfather like it was a favor for
somebody he wasn't too thrilled to be doing.

The Starz/Anchor
Bay BluRay transfer looks and sounds pretty good,
although not especially outstanding and the audio is only a compressed Dolby
Digital track. The disc itself is an even lower-budget affair than the film, as
there are absolutely no bonus feature at all, not even
a menu! The movie simply starts playing as soon as it loads into your player,
and then repeats from the beginning as soon as it's done. There are chapter
stops, at least, but they're all at arbitrary spots exactly 10 minutes apart.

Horror fans will
likely be underwhelmed by film's few gory parts and almost non-existent
suspense. For a film buff or Egyptophile, the movie is still probably worth
buying on BluRay at only $7 but not much more.

Substantially
better made-for-TV fare in the supernatural Egyptian genre on ultra-bargain BluRay is the silly, way overlong, but far more
entertaining and better-acted B-grade adventure-fantasy, The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb. And a bit
more fun in the old movie and old movie theatre horror genre is the okay
low-budget feature Midnight Movie (2008),
sometimes packaged with the even more fun movie production-themed horror comedy
Killer Movie (2008).

Song
Of Paris gets second-billing to The Crowded Day on the British Film
Institute’s double-feature disc of John Guillermin
films for its series of Adelphi Films, but it may be the most entertaining film
yet released in the collection. Financed and released by Adelphi, it was
actually made by another British B-production company, the Vandyke Picture
Corporation, co-starring French actress Anne Vernon and Russian-born American
comic Mischa Auer, with archetypal Englishman Dennis
Price leading the British contingent of the cast.

Song
Of Paris is a screwball romantic comedy (plus a
few songs by Vernon) that's very reminiscent of Hollywood comedies from the
1930s and 40s. Price plays the strictly-business head of a London company that
manufactures stomach pills, who must reluctantly travel to Paris to learn why
French sales have fallen off. There he inadvertently gets involved in a
publicity stunt with a beautiful cabaret singer (Vernon) who has been trying to
fend off the unwelcome romantic attentions of a persistent but penniless and
highly jealous count (Auer). Not long after Price gets safely back to his
London office, Vernon shows up looking for a job, leading to the obvious
misinterpretations by his staff, friends, and family about what all went on
during his brief visit to Paris. Price gradually learns to loosen up and defy
his domineering mother (a highly amusing Hermione Baddeley)
with the help of his sister (Joan Kenny) and the very willing Vernon. Of course
the count soon shows up to complicate things even further.

Besides the American-style
screwball comedy situations, Song of
Paris revels in poking fun at both British and French stereotypes. Baddeley has a great line about how good the family
business sales will remain, because a new British restaurant is opening
"so they'll need plenty of stomach pills." And there are plenty of
knowing winks and asides when the staid Price tries to find a secluded
apartment for Vernon so the count won't be able to track her down.

Picture quality on The BFI’s HD
transfer from the original negative is superb, with a few very minor scratches
in the original film more than made up for by the incredibly sharp image. Sound
is very good, although some low-frequency rumble will be noticeable with a
subwoofer turned up too loud. The informative booklet enclosed with the disc is
the only bonus feature.

SONG OF PARIS on Blu-ray:

Movie: A-/Video: A+/Audio: A-/Extras: D+

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977)

In May of 2009 Paramount released
to BluRay the movie that made a star of John Travolta
and helped make the disco craze into an emblem of the late 70s/early 80s, Saturday Night Fever (1977). Despite its
reputation as a dance movie, however, the film is actually a relentless and
surprisingly bleak slice of life in working class New York that is as much a
portrait of the era as Marty and Rebel Without a
Cause were for the 1950s.

The Blu
Ray disc reproduces the look and sound of the film admirably (its BeeGees-laden soundtrack now remixed for 5.1 stereo), and
includes a directors commentary plus a generous selection of extras, mostly in
HD.

The more catalog classics the
studios mine from their vaults for BluRay releases,
the more people can realize that high-definition pictures have really been
around for over a century on something called film. HDTV and BluRay have approximately the picture resolution of a good
16mm film negative or a typical 35mm film release print. If original film
negatives have survived in good condition, a BluRay
edition of any movie made over the past 85 years or so can look just as good as
most movies made today and may even look better.

SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER on BluRay

Movie:
B+Video: AAudio: AExtras:
A

THE SHINING (1980)

Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen
King’s The Shining (1980) is another iconic
horror thriller from the past 30 years. It has a very leisurely pace,
especially during its first half, but Kubrick’s slow, deliberate approach tends
to be more moodily disconcerting than off-putting. The basic premise of the
mental strain caused by being isolated in the middle of a quiet, lonely winter
may have even stronger resonance with people from North Dakota and Minnesota.
Jack Nicholson is at his best when he goes insane, a truly immortal moment from
American cinema.

The picture quality is lovely,
the audio is fine, and there are some good featurettes
and an audio commentary.

THE SHINING on BluRay

Movie: B+ / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: A

SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963)

Samuel Fuller, who died in 1997, would have turned 99 or 100 in 2011
(depending on which source you check). Criterion has released to Blu-Ray “Shock
Corridor” (1963) and “The Naked Kiss” (1964), two of his most influential films
on such current filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, and Tim Robbins) as well as European directors
like Jean-Luc Godard and WimWenders.
The latter film features substantial supporting roles for former silent
actresses Betty Bronson, Patsy Kelly, and Virginia Grey. Although issued on
Blu-ray separately, these two films make an ideal double-feature, and the
bonus-features give an interesting crash-course in Fuller's career and approach
to filmmaking.

Fuller was a crime reporter in the 1920s who turned to writing stories
and screenplays in the 1930s, and eventually got into directing in the late
1940s by telling a low-budget producer he’d sell him his script if he could
direct it himself at no extra fee. To achieve personal control with little
studio interference, he learned to thrive on the challenge of tighter budgets
and shorter deadlines, more concerned with grabbing the audience’s attention
and giving them something they’d remember than with lavish sets and the biggest
stars.

Never shying away from controversial social issues,
writer-producer-director Fuller’s success at turning out profitable films on
modest budgets quickly earned him regular work at major studios like Fox,
Universal, Columbia, and Warners during the 1950s and
early 60s, but by the early 60s the traditional studio system was falling
apart. To make the films he wanted he suddenly found himself an independent
searching for backers, but he continued making films until 1982 in the U.S.,
plus a couple more in France during the 1980s. He even acted in a few for other
directors.

While dismissed by some as sordid, tabloid-mentality exploitation films,
“Shock Corridor” and “The Naked Kiss” are considered by many critics among
Fuller’s best and most personal work, possibly second only to his
Oscar-nominated crime-spy thriller “Pickup On South Street” (1953). And even
those who appreciate both films often diverge on whether “Shock Corridor” or
“The Naked Kiss” is a superior, artistic film or merely an interesting exercise
in the director’s typical subject material. Both are rough-edged stories that
treat topics rarely handled by mainstream Hollywood productions, and both are
expertly photographed by Stanley Cortez, who shot Orson Welles’ “The
Magnificent Ambersons” and Charles Laughton’s “Night
of the Hunter.”

“Shock Corridor” follows the experiences of an ambitious reporter (Peter Breck) who goes to unusual extremes in hopes of getting a
story that will win him a Pulitzer Prize. To solve a murder in an insane
asylum, he pretends to be a sex pervert, enlisting his stripper-girlfriend
(Constance Towers) to pose as his concerned sister, and has himself committed
so he’ll be able to befriend the inmates who witnessed the crime. Naturally,
things do not go exactly as he’d planned and the experience begins to threaten
his own sanity.

During the course of the reporter’s investigation, however, Fuller uses
the conversations with patients as a vivid and often moving means to explore
political hypocrisy in American attitudes towards communism and collaborators,
racism and integration, and nuclear war, not to mention sexual hang-ups and
abuse of the institutionalized. In keeping with his occasionally experimental
techniques, a few brief dream/fantasy sequences are in color in the otherwise
black and white film. A good film, it sometimes shows its low budget and
occasionally seems a bit overly contrived in its daring approach. Some may also
find its obvious social commentary a bit heavy-handed at times, but it was
likely far more shocking and unexpected in 1963 and the metaphor of America as
a madhouse may still find a lot of resonance today. The film actually won
awards from humanitarian and religious groups.

SHOCK CORRIDOR on Blu-ray

Movie:
B+ / Video: A+ / Audio: A / Extras: B

THE SKULL (1965)

This effective low-budget adaptation of a Robert Bloch story has the feeling
of a Hammer horror film and many familiar cast members (including Patrick Wymark, Nigel Green, Patrick Magee, and Michael Gough), but
was an Amicus production released in the U.S. by Paramount. Freddie Francis
directed Peter Cushing as a researcher obsessed with the occult who becomes
possessed by the evil spirit of the Marquis de Sade after he buys a stolen
skull with mystical powers. Christopher Lee is the artifact’s former owner who warns Cushing he should get rid of it, but of
course he can’t and the skull forces him to do things he normally wouldn’t.

Seeing this movie on TV as a pre-teen was an incredibly frightening
experience, mainly due to its supernatural concept seeming potentially
plausible to an impressionable kid, much more terrifying than a human and
mortal villain. All these years (and many horror films) later, it retains a
certain creepiness that transcends the cut-rate special effects, though is now
more interesting for its genre conventions, cast, and director. (It’s also
great to finally see it in color and scope!)

Legend’s Blu-ray is quite sharp (so sharp you can now see the threads
holding the floating skull), although the Techniscope
widescreen photography is naturally grainer than the CinemaScope and Panavision
processes. Colors are strong but not as saturated as other Technicolor. As
usual, there are no bonus features besides a menu and chapter stops, but as one
of a double-feature on a disc with The
Man Who Could Cheat Death, it’s an easy purchase for fans of classic
British horror.

THE SKULL on Blu-ray --

Movie: B+ / Video: A- / Audio: A / Extras: F

THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1959)115m***

This may have been intended as one
of its major prestige pictures by 20th Century Fox, but the film’s
disastrous reception by critics who were outraged at its radical departure from
the William Faulkner novel, combined with lukewarm audience response, allowed
it to fall into obscurity. More inspired by than adapted from the book, Martin Ritt’s film of The
Sound and the Fury stands on its own as an effective piece of Southern
Gothic family character drama, owing perhaps as much to Tennessee Williams and
other southern writers as to Faulkner. The central character is a rebellious
illegitimate teenage girl named Quentin (Joanne Woodward), who despite her
intentional disobedience seems oddly attracted to her strict and pragmatic
guardian (YulBrynner), the
family’s relatively young patriarch who is struggling to maintain the family’s
respected position in the community despite various intermarriages and the now
dissolute lives of the original heirs.

The wide CinemaScope screen
effectively presents the colorful atmosphere of the town and the decaying estate.
Woodward delivers a fine performance although she’s a bit old for the role. Brynner is mannered but effective as Jason, the overbearing
head of the family who himself seems to have strangely conflicting feelings
towards Quentin. Margaret Leighton is excellent as Caddy, Quentin’s disgraced
prodigal mother who had abandoned her as a child to follow her fickle heart and
the kindness of strangers, but years later suddenly shows up at the family mansion
hoping for a place to stay. Stuart Whitman, Ethel Waters, and Jack Warden are
notable in supporting roles respectively as a sleazy fast-talking carney worker
hoping to run off with Quentin and some of her family fortune, as the
long-suffering family maid, and as the mentally deficient but ever-observant
son the townspeople may alternately ridicule or fear. Covering only a week or
less in time, the film's plot may not quite be Faulkner’s epic story, but it is
beautifully mounted and has its own peculiar charm.

The HD transfer on Twilight Time’s
Blu-ray is excellent, extremely sharp with beautiful color that again really
adds to the appreciation of the story, especially on a very large screen. The
sound is good, but it’s sometimes hard to tell whether the 2.0 DTS-HD MA
lossless track is stereo or slightly expanded mono, as
it does not decode particularly well into 4-channel surround, sounding better
out of just the left and right speakers. The disc includes an isolated track of
Alex North's music score, and a nice illustrated pamphlet with an interesting
essay by Julie Kirgo.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY on
Blu-ray –

Movie: A-/Video: A+/Audio A-/Extras: C-

SOUTH PACIFIC (1958)

In April 2009, the 1958 movie
version of South Pacific came out on Blu Ray, a lovingly prepared double-disc set that some
online critics were already proclaiming as the BluRay
release of the year.

It is quite interesting to watch
the movie version of the groundbreaking interracial romance set during World
War II so soon after seeing the stage production, and not only for the slightly
different interpretation of the roles. The film is very faithful to the stage
show, having been directed by Joshua Logan, who not only co-wrote the original
stage version but directed the Broadway premiere production.

The film’s cast is uniformly
excellent, a blend of movie stars and stage veterans. Mitzi Gaynor makes a
wonderful Nellie Forbush, and RossanoBrazzi is a fine Emile. Juanita Hall is the only
Broadway cast member to recreate her role on film (Bloody Mary) and Ray Walston, who played Luther Billis
on the London stage, is great in the film role.

The film opens up many scenes,
expanding locations and doing cross cutting impossible to do on stage,
especially the war sequences. It also expands or contracts several scenes and rearranges
others to different places in the plot. The film, however, displays the
restraints of 1950s censorship, as some of the plays salty language that is now
acceptable even on a high school stage (mainly the word bastard) had to be
reworded for sensitive 1950s film audiences, and extra
care had to be taken in depicting the unmarried romantic relationships in a
more ambiguous, nonsexual way.

The independently produced South Pacific won the Academy Award for
Best Sound but lost its nominations for Cinematography and Music Score to MGM’s
Gigi, which swept the Oscars that
year with eight wins including Best Picture. Gigi, incidentally, has also just come out on a beautifully
prepared BluRay disc, but is easily surpassed in
picture quality (and arguably in dramatic and musical quality) by South Pacific.

A still-controversial aspect of
the film South Pacific is no longer
its language or its pioneering plea for racial tolerance, but the
cinematographer’s experimental technique of using rotating color filters over
the lens during certain scenes to intensify the mood and/or to indicate a
stylized break from the crisp reality of its location shooting. Most musicals
were still shot in carefully controlled studio soundstages at the time, but South Pacific not only shot outdoors but
took its cast and crew to Hawaii for an authentic look. The intentional color
shifts were an attempt to apply theatre techniques to film without sacrificing
the realism of actual locations.

One reason South Pacific looks so good today is that it was shot in the
Todd-AO process, which used wide 65mm film instead of the 35mm standard, giving
double the picture area. The crystal-clear high-definition transfer actually
looks sharper than BluRay copies of many films
released today. The soundtrack was also recorded in multi-channel stereo sound,
and the original four-track mix still sounds impressive today. The BluRay includes a modernized 5.1 mix that gives a slightly
richer feeling but also exaggerates some of the original stereo effects.

The two-disc set comes with the
157-minute popular theatrical release version on one disc in high definition
(complete with overture and intermission music) and the original 172-minute
road show version on the other but only in standard definition. Unfortunately
the original negative survives only for the cutdown
version. The full-length version is reconstructed from several surviving, but
color-faded prints, so those parts later deleted are immediately obvious. Each
of the two versions, however has a different audio
commentary, explaining many different facts about the production.

A generous selection of mostly
high-definition bonus material includes an hour-and-a-half making of
documentary, an original 1950s behind the scenes documentary, a Mitzi Gaynor
screen test, clips from the original Broadway cast performances, a TV interview
with author James Michener, and more.

Anyone who likes musicals will
want to spend many hours with the BluRay 50th
Anniversary Edition of South Pacific
(while the road show premiered in fall of 1958, most cities played the
theatrical version in 1959, making 2009 the half-century mark of the hi-def version on the BluRay).

SOUTH PACIFIC on Blu Ray

Movie: A- / Video: A+ / Audio: A / Extras: A+

STAGECOACH (1939) and BUCKING BROADWAY (1917)

An increasing number of older
films and genuine classics have been released in the high-definition BluRay home video format over the past year, with more on
the way over the next year. Already its possible to put together a good 20-30
or more titles on BluRay that give a representative
cross-section of American and international cinema from the influential
half-century spanning the 1920s through the 1960s. A large percentage of those BluRays come from the Criterion Collection, with a
substantial number from Warner Home Video and a growing list from smaller
companies like Kino Video and European labels like Eureka.

One of the most iconic American
films of the 20th century made its BluRay
debut May 25th, 2010 from Criterion. John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) is sometimes credited
with changing the movie Western from routine low-budget action-adventure
formulas aimed at young boys into a higher-quality, serious genre for adults. Its also the film that turned John
Wayne into a major star and won an Oscar for character actor Thomas Mitchell
(who the very same year played Scarlett OHara’s
father in Gone With the Wind, the
cynical press secretary in Mr. Smith Goes
to Washington, and notable supporting roles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Only
Angels Have Wings).

Stagecoach incorporates all the usual stereotypes of Westerns, the
good outlaw, the kind-hearted prostitute, the wise marshal, the comic sidekick,
the Indian attack, the shootout on Main Street, and more. But Ford and
screenwriter Dudley Nichols turn the plots wide variety of characters into
human archetypes, giving each a depth far beyond the norm for a genre movie,
especially a western. The characters don’t merely go through the motions of the
plot, but are affected by them, changing their own outlooks and preconceived
notions by the end.

The plot that seems simple on the
surface a group of disparate passengers travel across hostile desert for
various reasons is both literally and figuratively a journey for all involved.
The period Western story becomes merely a framework for multiple layers of
contemporary social criticism, ranging from moral hypocrisy to class snobbism
to unjust legal systems to racial attitudes to the stifling oppressiveness of
urban life over the freedom of the wilderness and the unknown.

Even the expected use of Native
Americans as faceless antagonists to the white settlers is subverted by Ford
with low-angle close-ups of tribal elders and warriors that give them a
powerful dignity, and an implicit understanding that it is the whites’ intrusion
into Indian territory and breaking treaties that is
responsible for the uprising. Mexican-American relations likewise get a
sympathy that belies apparent stereotypes.

The film can be considered a
textbook of plot structure, character development, and cinematic technique, all
in the service of telling a crowd-pleasing story while conveying personal
attitudes to the audience. Numerous critics have analyzed Ford’s expert use of
setting, camera, and editing in Stagecoach,
and Orson Welles claimed to have run it over 40 times before making Citizen Kane.

Stagecoach has been available on
an adequate DVD from Warner Home Video for some time, but Criterion’s new BluRay is now the definitive version. Unfortunately the
original camera negative has been lost, and until now all copies have been
several generations from the original, made from beat-up old TV prints or from
a dupe made off John Wayne’s personal 35mm print.

Criterion was able to locate a
duplicate negative from the 1940s that preserves most of the clarity that is
lost in muddy shadows on other copies. There is still a noticeable amount of
film wear, scratches and dirt in various sections, mainly the beginnings and
ends of reels. Criterion wisely allowed it to remain, rather than applying
excessive digital cleanup that would also have softened the overall picture and
eliminated details. Audio quality is generally quite good, restored from
multiple sources and presented in its original mono.

Criterion’s edition excels in its
bonus features, making this an excellent disc for self-directed study of the
film, of John Ford, and of movie Westerns. Most notable is the inclusion of a
delightful and rare early feature by Ford, his 54-minute 1917 silent Western Bucking Broadway, starring
long-time Ford favorite Harry Carey. This film was restored from a copy
discovered in Europe with picture quality that’s only mediocre, often overly contrasty and sometimes choppy. However, a superb musical
accompaniment by Donald Sosin has been added and the
rollicking romantic melodrama is quite entertaining. Carey plays Cheyenne
Harry, a Wyoming cowboy who falls for his boss’ daughter, and then must rescue
her after a sleazy city slicker cons her into coming to New York with the
promise of marriage. Plot elements, (especially the cheerful brawl near the
end), photographic compositions, and editing touches already show director
Ford’s trademark style well-established by 1917.

Stagecoach has a good audio commentary by an expert on Westerns.
There’s an excellent video essay on Ford’s style, an illuminating uncut 1968
interview with Ford filmed for the BBC, home movies of John Ford narrated by
his grandson, and several other interesting video featurettes
on Ford, the locations, and the stunts, all in high definition. There’s also a
copy of the original trailer (a bit beat-up and dupey-looking)
and the 1949 radio dramatization with John Wayne and Claire Trevor repeating
their roles, as well as a 36-page booklet with a critical essay and a reprint
of the original short story that inspired the film.

The BluRay
of Stagecoach is a must-buy for any
film buff or fan of Westerns or director John Ford.

STAGECOACH on BluRay

Movie: A / Video: A- / Audio: A- / Extras: A+

BUCKING BROADWAY on BluRay:

Movie: A / Video: C+ / Audio: A+ / Extras: N/A

SUNRISE (1927)

The nominations for the 2010
Oscars ceremony were announced the first week of February, and for the first
time since 1943 they had ten nominees for Best Picture. The very first Oscars divided
the Best Picture into two categories of three contenders each: Outstanding
Picture and Unique and Artistic Picture, but that was reduced to a single
category of five contenders for the next three years, and expanded to between
eight and twelve nominees from 1932-1943 (often considered the golden age of
Hollywood). For the 1944 releases, they cut back to five nominees, which it
remained through last year.

The first and only film ever to
win the Academy Award for Most Artistic or Unique Production was the Fox film, Sunrise, which also picked up Oscars for
Best Actress (Janet Gaynor) and Best Cinematography (Charles Rosher and Karl Struss). Art
director RochusGliese was
also under consideration, but lost to William Cameron Menzies’
designs for The Dove and Tempest. Since its release in 1927, Sunrise has made numerous critical lists
of top 10 and top 100 films of all time.

Even in his own time, German
director F. W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Faust) was recognized as one of the worlds major filmmakers, and had been brought to
Hollywood to help raise the standards of American films. His first American
project was Sunrise. One would expect
such a prestigious film to be a natural for home video release, but it has been
difficult and/or expensive to get hold of.

Sunrise came out in a nice DVD
edition in 2003 with lots of great bonus features; however, it was first
available only by sending in proof-of-purchase from three other titles in 20th
Century Fox’s classics series, then only in a four-disc set. Five years later Sunrise was included in Fox’s
magnificent 12-disc box set of films directed by F. W. Murnau
and Frank Borzage, and this time included an
alternate European cut discovered in Prague, as well. That version is 15
minutes shorter and often uses different takes, but the original 1927 print of
it survived with higher picture quality than the American release, whose
original negative was destroyed in a 1937 fire. Thus all copies had to be made
from other copies.

Now both versions of Sunrise are available on BluRay in a wonderful high-definition transfer, but only
through Britain’s Eureka! label in their Masters of
Cinema series. Luckily it’s an all-region disc that can play on BluRay players worldwide, and its bonus materials are all
compatible with America’s NTSC video format. The BluRay
of Sunrise can easily be ordered
through Amazon.co.uk. with the cost converted
automatically to American dollars.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans is an intimate, emotional story of
love lost and regained, complicated by disenchantment with a once-idyllic rural
life, temptation to murder, regret, renewal, with and an unexpected
intervention of nature to complicate things. A simple farmer falls prey to the
charms of a city woman who convinces him he should kill his wife, sell the farm,
and move to the city with her for a more exciting life.

Far more than a trite love
triangle, the film constantly contrasts good and evil, light and dark,
innocence and guilt, country and city, peasant and bourgeoisie, traditional and
modern. Using elements of German Expressionism, Murnau
deliberately distorts settings and actors movements to a certain extent, in
order to emphasize his themes visually and to give them a timeless setting
rather than tying them to a specific period and location. The stylization may
seem quaint at first to viewers unfamiliar with silent film conventions, but
despite occasional excesses, the film rewards the time it may take to see it
for what it is.

Sunrise was made near the end of cinema’s silent era, and requires
very few titles to explain action or dialogue. In 1927, Fox studios recorded a
soundtrack of music and sound effects to accompany the film in theatres that
had already installed sound equipment. That track was restored and is included
with both versions here (condensed to match the shorter Czech release), with an
alternate new orchestra score in digital stereo on the American version.

Because the surviving American
version of Sunrise looks slightly
soft, the BluRay’s hi-def
upgrade shows only a marginal improvement over the DVD release, but does reveal
slightly more of the lower image area than the DVD. However, the BluRay’s picture quality on the Czech version is incredibly
crisper and clearer, as sharp as a film copy would be.
Although a quarter-hour shorter, the Czech version doesn’t really delete any
scenes. Some scenes are slightly shorter, and others are missing shots or
frames, or have different takes or angles, occasionally in a different order.
Because it was a silent print, it also has the full 1.33:1 picture width,
whereas the American version has the nearly square 1.2:1 ratio that resulted
when the soundtrack was added.

Bonus materials are essentially
the same as were on the DVD, including a very informative and appreciative
analytical commentary by Hollywood cinematographer John Bailey. The trailer,
showing some alternate takes of some shots, and a selection of outtakes (also
with commentary) are fascinating, as is the 40-minute featurette
reconstructing Murnau's lost film Four Devils from
stills, titles, and production art. A new 20-page booklet has photos and
discusses the films restoration and the different versions.

Because few people have BluRay drives in their computers, Eureka has put
downloadable files of the original Four
Devils and Sunrise scripts on
their website (www.mastersofcinema.org), as well as a pdf
scanned from the actual Sunrise
scenario with notations by Murnau in German, plus a pdf of a 39-page critical essay on the film by Dudley
Andrew. These are invaluable for in-depth study of the film, especially with
the two alternate cuts available for comparison. The SunriseBluRay is a must for any serious
video collection.

Cecil B. DeMille's
remake of his silent epic is the epitome of lavish Hollywood spectacle.
Amazingly, it manages to inject enough character and sincerity into its poetic
dialogue and nearly four-hour high melodrama to be simultaneously morally inspiring
and campy fun, besides showing off eye-popping Technicolor and VistaVision
visuals, effective early stereo surround sound, wonderful art direction, and
still impressive special effects.

The first two-and-a-quarter hours
follow Moses from his birth, through his rise as a prince of Egypt and rivalry
with Ramses, discovery of his Hebrew origins, and exile into the desert. After
the intermission (at the end of disc one) there's just an hour-and-a-half left
to go, as he returns to Egypt to lead his people to the promised
land. There has never been a Moses to equal Charlton Heston
nor a Ramses like YulBrynner.

The 2010 restoration is nothing
short of spectacular on Paramount’s 2011 Blu-ray, quite possibly the best
transfer of any film yet issued on the medium, old or new, a superb
representation of the original film. Except for some bluescreen
and composite shots that look much more obvious with the higher quality than
they ever did on standard definition video, the film looks as though it was
shot yesterday. Details and textures are visible that could never be seen on
DVD, VHS or even ABC-TV’s hi-def broadcast Easter
weekend, and colors look more vivid than the theatrical reissue some 20 years
ago. The lossless 5.1 DTS sound is likewise impressive, clearly revealing
details of dialogue by extras during crowd murmurs previously hard to make out.
In short, “The Ten Commandments” looks and sounds better than it ever did since
its premiere in 1956.

The deluxe gift set has a cleverly
designed, if somewhat awkward box that literally parts the Red Sea to open,
revealing a plastic replica of the ten commandments
tablets, which themselves contain the six discs in the set (three Blu-rays and three DVDs). Then there's a nice little
hardcover commemorative book about the film, a replica of the original souvenir
program booklet, and several reproductions of various memorabilia connected
with the film (telegrams, a commissary menu with sketches on it, costume
designs, etc.).

The most welcome of the Blu-ray
extras is the complete 1923 version in full HD (on Blu-ray disc 3, which is
missing from the cheaper 2-disc Blu-ray edition), and there are the same
excellent audio commentaries that were on the 2006 DVD release. There's a new
and very good 73-minute documentary about the film's history, an informative
1953 10-minute promotional featurette of DeMille discussing the film, newsreel footage of the film's
premiere, and trailers. Perhaps the most unexpected bonus is that all of the
extras are also in fine 1080p transfers, not merely upscaled
or ported-over standard-definition transfers from earlier DVD editions.

Silent film fans may consider the
1923 film as the main feature in the deluxe edition, with the 1956 remake as
the bonus. DeMille's original version is two films in
one, the first 50 minutes following Moses through the Exodus and parting of the
Red Sea, to getting the 10 commandments. The last 86 minutes are a heavily
allegorical modern 1920s morality play as only DeMille
could tell it, with every melodramatic stop pulled out (greatly intensified by
the thundering pipe organ score, also with every stop pulled out).

Great drama or powerful social
statement it's not, but valuable social document of 1920s pop culture and
highly entertaining hokum it most certainly is! Bonus materials for the silent
version include a fine commentary, 20 minutes of color-tinted footage showing
the Exodus sequence, part of that same sequence with two-color Technicolor
footage, and a stills gallery, all in full-HD.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS on Blu-ray

Movies: A / Video: A+ / Audio: A+ / Extras: A+

THE TERMINATOR (1980)

“The Terminator” (1984) was among
the very first group of films released on BluRay back
in 2006. James Cameron’s unexpected hit became a cultural icon of the decade,
made a star of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and spawned much higher budget hi-tech
sequels that continue to this day. The literate script makes the most of its
limited means by concentrating on its intriguing post-apocalyptic time-travel
premise, its central characters, and memorable imagery.

Picture quality is far better
than the DVD version, but not quite up to what newly mastered BluRay discs usually deliver. The originally mono
soundtrack was effectively remixed for stereo surround. There are few bonus
features on the disc, unfortunately, just a couple of featurettes
and some deleted scenes, all in standard definition.

THE TERMINATOR on BluRay:

Movie:
A-Video: B+Audio: AExtras:
C-

THOSE DARING YOUNG MEN IN THEIR JAUNTY JALOPIES (1969)

In 1965, British director Ken Annakin made the
popular all-star epic comedy about 1910-era airplane racing, “Those Magnificent
Men In Their Flying Machines.” Four
years later he tried to repeat that hit with this similar epic slapstick comedy
about 1920s-era car racing, including a couple of the same cast members.
It didn’t get the same success, but it’s still quite entertaining and
sporadically hilarious. Tony Curtis plays an American who has won a half-share
in the British car company that slime-ball Terry-Thomas has just inherited and
wants all to himself. They agree to enter the Monte Carlo endurance race, and
that the one who finishes first will own the whole company. Curtis meets lovely
Susan Hampshire enroute, who first succeeds in slowing
him down but becomes his invaluable assistant. The film cuts back and forth
among the adventures of several competing teams from across Europe including a
French woman doctor, an Italian Lothario, a German jewel smuggler, and the
funniest of them all, two British ex-officers played by Peter Cook and Dudley
Moore.

The Panavision picture is letterboxed to 2.35 on the Blu-ray, despite the
box saying it is 1.78. Although there is some minor dirt and occasional light
wear, the high-definition transfer is so beautifully sharp that it’s barely
noticeable. The audio sounds fine, but the two-channel stereo track does not
decode well into full 5.1. As with Legend’s other bargain double-feature
Paramount catalog titles, there is not a single special feature other than a
main menu and chapter stops.

THOSE DARING YOUNG MEN IN THEIR
JAUNTY JALOPIES on Blu-ray

Movie:
B+ / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: F

TOPSY-TURVY (1999)

“Topsy-Turvy”
is Mike Leigh's biopic of Gilbert & Sullivan, but focusing only on the
period when they came to compose, rehearse, and stage "The Mikado"
(though scenes from various earlier Gilbert & Sullivan shows are also
depicted). Jim Broadbent and Allan Corduner as
Gilbert and Sullivan, respectively, lead the excellent cast that includes Timothy
Spall as majorD’Oyly Carte
actor Richard Temple.

The film’s
historical recreation of the late Victorian era is painstakingly detailed, as
is the ever-timeless representation of how a stage show is created, with all
the backstage intrigues, personality issues, etc. Anyone who has ever done any
theatre, whether acting or on the stage crew, needs to see it (as well as the
bonus features that explain the amazing and unconventional way Leigh came up
with his script).

“Topsy-Turvy” is a
perfect companion piece to watch just after or before the 1939 “Mikado,” and
both discs' bonus features also tie in beautifully with each other (new 2010 HD
interviews of Leigh obviously taped at the same time). The one on this disc
runs 38 minutes and includes music director Gary Yershon
giving valuable insight into the characters, the production, and the period it
covers. There’s also a featurette with cast members
from the time the film was made, a half-hour short by Leigh written by
Broadbent, three deleted scenes, a 1999 audio commentary by Leigh, and of
course a nice illustrated booklet.

Interestingly, the
picture quality, while very sharp, seems to look a touch less film-like than
the gorgeous “Mikado” transfer (a film made sixty years earlier), although
“Topsy-Turvy’s” stereo audio is excellent.

TOPSY-TURVY” (1999) on Blu-ray

Movie: A / Video: A / Audio: A+ / Extras:
A

TOKYO SONATA (2008)

“Tokyo Sonata” (2008), directed
by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) won the Jury Prize “Un Certain
Regard” at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The film premiered in Japan that
September, and played in the U.S. throughout most of 2009 in a very limited
release that never reached more than 10 theatres at a time. It is actually
scheduled for a US DVD release in 2010 at $25 from the Koch Vision label, often
noted for mediocre transfers, but is already available as a DVD import from YesAsia in the $15-$20 range, and can be found on BluRay for about $21 plus shipping through Amazon.co.uk.

“Tokyo Sonata” is a low-key and
very moving domestic drama from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, better-known for his horror
films like “Cure” and “Kairo” (the latter remade as
“Pulse” in the US). It is a very straightforward story of a middle-class family
whose father is laid off from his long-time office job, but to avoid
embarrassment, he pretends he is still working as he attempts to find new
employment.

Kurosawa’s camera lingers
leisurely over carefully composed, delicately staged scenes of everyday life in
a style that is reminiscent of the classic works of YasujiroOzu. We observe the strained family relationships
resulting from lack of interpersonal communication, from ingrained tradition
vs. the fear of starting over from scratch. Powerful performances all around
let us identify with the inner struggles of the father, the mother, and each of
the two very different sons, one a young musical prodigy and the other a sullen
slacker who hopes to join the American army as a way out of economic distress.

This film managed a 36% combined
A and B audience rating during its US release, but still had a 50% F rating,
apparently either too slow-moving for Americans or merely too uncomfortable to
watch for viewers insecure with their own jobs. Its world-wide critical acclaim
testifies to “Tokyo Sonata’s” universal story about individual dignity and
human relationships amidst today’s uncertain economic climate.

“Tokyo Sonata” looks and sounds
great on Eureka’s BluRay, with optional English
subtitles. Extras include an hour-long “making-of” documentary, interviews and
discussions with the stars and director at the Tokyo premiere, and the original
UK trailer, plus a 28-page booklet with a good essay by Brooklyn
writer-filmmaker B. Kite.

TOKYO SONATA on BluRay:

Movie: A / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B

VERA CRUZ (1954)

About ten years after the Civil
War, Gary Cooper is a quick-witted but slow-talking former Louisiana colonel
who's been driven off his plantation, and Burt Lancaster is an outlaw leader of
a band of renegades as fast with his mouth as he is with his gun. Both are in
Mexico looking for adventure and for money, just as the peasants are uniting
under Juarez to overthrown the emperor Maximilian. Being both cynical and
mercenary, they naturally can't resist the financial offer of a charming
marquis played by Cesar Romero instead of joining the revolutionaries
(including beautiful peasant girl SaritaMoneil). Maximilian hires them to escort a beautiful
countess (Denise Darcel) to a port city so she can
return to Paris, not revealing that her carriage actually contains three
million in gold intended to finance European military aid against the
revolutionaries. Of course Lancaster, Cooper, and Darcel
all discover the truth and devise their own plots together and individually to
obtain the gold for themselves, with none of them trusting the other.

The result is an entertaining if
sometimes predictable action film with lots of intrigue, double-crosses,
romantic attachments feigned and real, a few surprises, and of course being a
Robert Aldrich film, there’s plenty of violence that's more on a 1960s or 70s
level than the 1950s. The characterizations, attitudes, and various plot
elements bear certain similarities to films like THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY,
THE WILD BUNCH, and even the recent COWBOYS AND ALIENS. Among Lancaster's gang
are such familiar character actors as Ernest Borgnine,
Charles Bronson, and Jack Elam, adding to the fun. Though Lancaster helped
produce the film and hams up his anti-heroic role with gusto, it's Cooper who's
the real star and most sympathetic character. VERA CRUZ makes interesting
screening immediately after or before KISS ME DEADLY, directed by Aldrich the
following year and featuring several of the same character actors in supporting
roles (see review above).

The picture quality is generally
good with vivid colors (especially the red opening titles), but since this was
shot in the low-budget non-anamorphic widescreen format of SuperScope
(now called Super 35), cropping and blowing up the image to a 2:1 ratio makes
the picture obviously grainier than a standard format film, especially whenever
there's a night scene that required faster film, or an optical effect like a
dissolve (both of which happen frequently and sometimes together). The
high-definition Blu-ray transfer reveals all the graininess of these scenes,
but also shows how sharp the SuperScope image could
be in straight scenes in bright daylight. The mono audio is fine, although not
particularly memorable. The only bonus feature on the disc is the original
trailer (in high-definition), although there are chapter stops, Spanish and
French-dubbed soundtracks, and optional English, Spanish, and French subtitles.
Once again, as with recent MGM/Fox Blu-rays, there is
annoyingly no main menu, only a popup menu.

VERA CRUZ on Blu-ray

Movie: B / Video: A- / Audio:
A- / Extras: F+

THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953)

Sometimes-controversial French
director Henri-Georges Clouzot is noted mainly for
his Hitchcockian thrillers Diabolique (1955) and The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur)
(1953), the latter of which came out on BluRay from
Criterion in April 2009.

Clouzot
began preparations for The Wages of Fear
by 1949 and shot it under difficult conditions in 1951 and 1952. The original
155-minute version won Best Picture at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival and
British Academy Awards, but its American distributor cut nearly an hour for the
1955 U.S. release that circulated for years, mainly from its first half. Even
the 105-minute version was denounced by many 1950s American critics as both
anti-American and unacceptably bleak, besides suggestions of a distasteful
homosexual subtext. A restored 147-minute edition was finally released in 1991
and that is the version now on BluRay.

The Wages of Fear begins very slowly and deliberately, lingering on
details and beautifully-composed shots that establish the poverty-stricken
Central American village and its diverse collection of seedy, international
(and multi-lingual) ne’er-do-wells who struggle to maintain a precarious and
sordid existence. The town’s main source of income derives from an American oil
company that relies on villagers for dangerous and low-paid labor.

When an oil well catches fire,
the company shows up to hire truck drivers to transport loads of nitroglycerine
to the site across bumpy, perilous rural roads. The last half of the film is
one of the most tension-packed sequences in cinema history as two pairs of
volunteers attempt to make the trip without exploding along the way. Throughout
all the nail-biting suspense, the characters continue to develop and evolve.

The film has influenced many
other directors, notably Sam Peckinpah in his opening
shots of The Wild Bunch. In 1977,
American director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection)
remade the story under the misleading title Sorcerer.

The BluRay
disc has a superb high-definition transfer of the striking black-and-white
image in its original 1.37 to 1 aspect ratio, with very good sound. As usual,
Criterion includes a 16-page pamphlet with an essay about the film, and several
interesting disc supplements, this time unfortunately all in standard
definition. There is no audio commentary, but there are some recent interviews
with an assistant director and a biographer of Clouzot,
plus a 1988 interview with star Yves Montand. There’s
a good 2004 feature-length French documentary on the life and career of Clouzot, and a brief documentary that details the cuts made
for the films first American release.

THE WAGES OF FEAR on BluRay:

Movie: A- / Video: A+ / Audio:
A / Extras: B+

WALKABOUT (1971)

Notable classic, foreign, and
independent films are continuing to show up on BluRay.
In late April of 2010, Kino Video released a fine BluRay
version of the restored Russian silent, Battleship
Potemkin (1925), which they’d already put out on a very nice standard DVD a
couple of years earlier. In May 2010 Criterion came out with not only John
Ford’s iconic western Stagecoach
(1939), but BluRay upgrades of Fritz Lang’s memorable
crime drama M (1931) and Nicolas Roeg’s stunningly beautiful and multi-layered allegory Walkabout (1971), all of them staples of
film societies and film classes. All of these are must-see, if not must-own
titles for anyone into film.

Roeg
was a British cinematographer who turned to directing, sometimes shooting his
own movies himself. Walkabout, his
first solo film as a director looks on the surface like a basic story of
survival and coming-of-age, as well as a visual tour across Australia. A
British teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little
brother (Lucien John, Roeg’s 10-year-old son) find
themselves abandoned in the Australian outback and must find their way back to
civilization.

In the desert they meet a teenage
aborigine boy (David Gulpilil) who is going through
the native rite of passage known as Walkabout, proving he can survive on his
own. Despite not speaking the same language, they become for a while a small
family as the aborigine boy helps the girl and her brother to survive. Of
course, two adolescents of opposite sexes develop their own natural tension.

Roeg’s
richly colorful cinematography and often daringly unconventional editing
present a vivid portrait of the abundant life in the supposedly barren outback,
contrasting the human struggle against the natural elements. Shot entirely on
location, it’s obviously a metaphor comparing the man-made emotional deserts
and regimentation of modern urban life with the literal, physical desert and
very different rituals of existence in untouched, unspoiled natural
surroundings.

The film is also a parable about
the lack of communication between cultures, races, sexes, generations, and
people in general. On yet another layer it is a wistful modern dramatization of
the Garden of Eden story from “Genesis” -- the loss of paradise after a loss of
innocence.

Criterion’s old DVD looked good, but
their new high-definition transfer is a wonderful representation of the film’s
image. A few shots on the BluRay seem to look
slightly lighter, but both transfers were approved by Roeg
himself and the BluRay is noticeably sharper through
a hi-def projector, and still preserves the original
film grain. The soundtrack is presented in its original mono, digitally cleaned
up to eliminate hiss and pops in the old optical print.

The BluRay
includes the same interesting audio commentary by the director and star as on
the DVD, but adds several more bonus materials. There’s a new 20-minute
interview (in hi-def) with Luc Roeg,
now a movie producer himself, reminiscing earlier this year about the film and
his fathers career. There’s also a 20-minute
standard-def interview with Jenny Agutter
done in 2008, a 50-minute documentary on actor David Gulpilil
and his importance to cinematic portrayals of aboriginal people (also standard-def), and a 28-page color illustrated booklet. The U.S.
theatrical trailer had also been on the DVD, but on the BluRay
it is now in hi-def (although its
much grainier than the film itself).

The only problem with the disc is
that the first pressing had problems playing on certain models of BluRay players. A few would not load it at all and others
would freeze up and/or skip at certain points. (One of my players ran the disc
fine, whereas the other one of the same brand but a different model would not
play the bonus features all the way and the menu would sometimes freeze.)
Criterion is planning replacements that can be obtained by contacting them
through their website.

WALKABOUT on BluRay:

Movie: A+ / Video: A / Audio:
A- / Extras:
A-

THE WAYWARD BUS (1957)89m*** ½

This
all-but-forgotten film was adapted from a best-selling but almost
equally-forgotten John Steinbeck novel published a decade earlier. Loosely
inspired by Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” it’s one of those journey stories
with a group of travelers representing a symbolic microcosm of society, going
through a variety of experiences together and in smaller subsets of the group
as we (and they) learn a bit about each other in the process. In Southern
California a Mexican-American bus driver (Rick Jason, future star of TV’s
“Combat”) has a stormy relationship with his alcoholic, penny-pinching wife
(Joan Collins) that builds to a boiling point as he is about to take eight
passengers to San Juan on his broken-down old bus just when a severe storm and
landslides close the highway, forcing a more perilous route on an old road.
There’s an irascible old man, a teenage girl and boy, a fast-talking salesman
(Dan Dailey), a cynical but sensitive exotic dancer (Jayne Mansfield), and an
uptight middle-aged couple taking their rebellious daughter on a trip to keep
her out of trouble, although she keeps trying to come on to the driver.
Everyone’s got personal relationship problems of some sort, and throughout the
course of the journey, most of them work out for better or for worse with a reasonably
satisfying yet not completely resolved conclusion (that’s nevertheless more
detailed and “Hollywood” than the ambiguous ending in the book). The strong
current of sexual tension pervading the story is presented mainly through
suggestion andimplications, due to the
loosening but still-powerful Production Code regulations, but it’s sometimes
surprising just how frank it is allowed to become for the period (especially in
its trailer).

During the ten
years the project was in development before it was finally filmed, it had been
planned as a bigger prestige production with stars like Marlon Brando, Anthony
Quinn, Robert Mitchum, Jennifer Jones, Joanne
Woodward, Susan Hayward, Richard Widmark, and Gene
Tierney attached or under consideration for the cast, and major directors
George Stevens and Henry Hathaway planned to direct at different times. As it
turned out, the film became the first American feature for obscure Russian-born
French director Victor Vicas. Though it never found a
large audience at the time, today it may actually be more effective with its
lesser-known actors allowing the characters to become the focus rather than
famous faces and star mannerisms distracting viewers from the story. The
ensemble cast is very strong, and it’s especially nice to see Collins and
Mansfield in unusually dramatic roles instead of the sex-symbol stereotypes
they’re best known for. This was two years after Collins’ campy vamp in LAND OF
THE PHARAOHS, six months after Mansfield’s airhead in THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT and
just two months before her wacky bimbo in WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER. Fans
of those films must have been shocked if they saw Collins and Mansfield in THE
WAYWARD BUS where both give powerful, often poignant performances. The moody
black-and-white CinemaScope camera work by veteran Oscar nominee Charles G.
Clarke is truly outstanding, making the most of dramatic lighting effects and
placement of actors across the widescreen frame and bringing out the textures
of the effective settings. The film should have done for Mansfield what BUS
STOP did for Marilyn Monroe, and though it earned slightly more than its budget
it never really clicked with critics or audiences, perhaps seeming too “common”
in its subject material. Today, however, THE WAYWARD BUS stands out as a
well-made and well-acted human drama that presents a valuable glimpse into the
mindset of its era.

Picture quality
on Twilight Time’s Blu-ray is beautiful projected four feet tall and roughly
nine-and-a-half feet wide, and the original mono sound is very good. Bonuses
include an illustrated pamphlet, an isolated music track, the original
theatrical trailer (in standard-def, unfortunately,
but which makes the film appear much more salacious than it actually is), plus
a very fine commentary by film historians Alain Silver and James Ursini (better known for their commentaries on various film
noir DVDs) giving a perceptive story and character analysis as well as
interesting production background.

THE WAYWARD BUS on Blu-ray --

Movie:
A-/Video: A/ Audio: A/Extras: B

WE WERE SOLDIERS (2002)

For movies on BluRay
about the 1960s and the Vietnam War experience, a good complement to Across the Universe is Randall Wallace’s
We Were Soldiers (2002), starring Mel
Gibson and Greg Kinnear. Avoiding the clichés and outright militaristic
propaganda of John Wayne’s The Green
Berets (1968),it is instead an
unflinching and unrelenting soldier’s point of view of young men’s first
experiences fighting in the first battles of the Vietnam war.
The war’s waste of lives and the unpreparedness of Americans’ military training
for their situation become far more intense than the stylized but nevertheless
moving emotional abstractions of Across
the Universe. Extras include a commentary, a hi-def
trailer, a featurette and ten short deleted scenes
all in standard-def. Best of all, it’s available for
only $10-$15!

WE WERE SOLDIERS on BluRay:

Movie A-
/Video A+ / Audio
A+ / Extras B+

WHITE CHRISTMAS (1954)

“White Christmas” will probably
be the best choice of the several classic Christmas films now on Blu-ray for
viewers who have recently upgraded to full 1080p HDTV sets. Bing Crosby and
Danny Kaye star with Rosemary Clooney and Vera-Ellen in the story of two army
buddies who become a popular song-and-dance team after the war and join a
sister act to put on a show at a remote Vermont inn that happens to be run by
their old army general.

While its sentimental story is
often hackneyed and predictable, the classic Irving Berlin songs and breezy
performances remain an attraction. And now this lushly restored edition has an
extremely impressive upgrade in picture quality over any previous video
version. With its vibrant colors and crisp transfer it looks as sharp as any
new movie on Blu-ray. This is due partly to the fact it was the first film made
in the VistaVision widescreen process, whose larger image area gave double the
picture resolution of other films of the time.

Paramount has reworked the audio
into a pleasing 5.1 stereo track and also restored the original mono sound for
audio purists. There is a generous selection of bonus features, including a commentary
by Clooney and numerous new retrospective featurettes
produced in HD.

WHITE CHRISTMAS” on Blu-ray

Movie: B+ / Video: A+ / Audio: A / Extras: A

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

Although the BluRay
format uses a substantial amount of digital compression, a properly done
transfer of a film to high-definition video, using well-preserved original film
elements, can reproduce details that have always been there but were never
visible in previous video formats.

Many video collectors and a
surprising number of video reviewers seem genuinely shocked at how sharp an old
film from even the 1990s, let alone the 1930s or 40s or 50s or 60s, usually
looks in a new BluRay edition, apparently never
having seen older films actually projected on film. The more studios decide to
release on BluRay the films of the past that made
them great, the more it can demonstrate just how much sharper film has always
been, compared with television standards.

The Wizard of Oz is a perfect example. Most people are familiar with
the 70-year-old film from countless TV airings or from numerous video releases
on VHS and DVD. If they’re lucky, they may have seen one of a few theatrical
reissues, which may or may not have had a film print in good condition and
projected in focus, or may have had a hastily-made kiddie matinee print that
was pale, washed-out, possibly beat-up, and no true representation of what it
was supposed to look like.

For the BluRay
edition (and even for the 2005 DVD), the original camera negative was scanned
in high definition, yielding more detail than many typical 35mm theatrical
prints. The color scenes, especially, are sharper because Technicolor used
three separate black and white negatives, one for each color (and thus immune
to the fading that often plagues color films from the 1950s through the 1980s),
and modern computerized registration was able to recombine them much more
precisely than Technicolor’s original mechanical color printing process. The
result is truly stunning and very film-like.

For The Wizard of Oz, the studio was lucky enough to have preserved
separately mixed soundtracks of the music, sound effects, and dialogue,
allowing it to be remixed in stereo without artificial electronic extractions
to simulate stereo. The BluRay has a tastefully done
and quite effective 5.1 lossless stereo track, as well as including the
original mono soundtrack in English and five other languages.

This time, Warner Bros. heeded
consumer complaints about 2008’s Casablancacollectors edition having no moderately-priced
movie-only alternative. The Wizard of Oz
release had a variety of $55-$65 box sets with special premiums and
collectibles, a $35 three-disc Emerald Edition exclusive to Target stores that
had only the BluRay of the movie and the two bonus
discs, plus a $20 one-disc BluRay release initially
available only at Walmart. By late 2010, the
movie-only BluRay of The Wizard of Oz could be found for as low as $10.

Thanks to the storage capacity of
BluRay discs, the one main disc still has a fair
amount of bonus materials, including an audio commentary, featurettes,
audio sessions and more. The three-disc edition includes a new documentary on
director Victor Fleming, a frustratingly fuzzy copy of a 1990 TV movie
dramatizing author L. Frank Baum’s life, four complete full-length silent
feature films based on Oz stories and produced by Baum himself, a 1910 short Oz
film, and a 1933 cartoon. The cartoon is in fair condition but all five silent
films have quite good transfers (notably the 1925 one starring Larry Semon and Oliver Hardy), though unfortunately all are in
standard definition, and two of them have no musical accompaniment and are
presented with no soundtracks. The third disc is a standard DVD with a six-hour
documentary on MGM studios (also included in the Gone With the Wind box set). The box sets
include a fourth disc with a lower-resolution “digital copy,” as well as
reproductions of memorabilia and other collectibles.

One of the BluRay
editions of The Wizard of Oz should
be considered a must-buy for anyone who has a high-definition television set.

THE WIZARD OF OZ on BluRay:

Movie: A+ / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: A

WOODSTOCK (1970)

Neither the popular 1960s play
“Hair” (nor its 1970s film version) is nowhere close to recreating the era as
vividly as it was captured in the 1970 documentary Woodstock, an amazing record of the 1969 rock concert held 40 years
ago this weekend. The mere word Woodstock quickly became a symbol of a certain
segment of a generation.

The expanded 1994 director’s cut
of Woodstock came out on BluRay in early summer of 2009. The movie itself is
interesting from several standpoints. Most obvious, of course, are the musical
performances--a pleasing variety of folk, blues, classic rock, and hard rock,
from a capella and acoustic to heavy electric sounds,
and from Joan Baez to Sha Na Na
to the Who, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix. The audio recording was of a very
high standard, especially for a documentary shot live on location as it
happened, showing just how effective analog sound can be with good multitrack equipment. The film has a nice stereo mix,
notably during split-screens.

As well as
demonstrating effective use of multi-image editing (a monumental effort in
pre-computer days, with over 100 hours of footage shot on five cameras),
portions show how sharp that often-grainy 16mm film can be when blown up to
35mm and converted to high-definition video.

The wide
theatrical screen sometimes contains the almost square original image in the middle,
right, or left, and sometimes zooms that image out to
make it look wider and emphasize the size of the crowd. Along with
push-processed night footage, this is where the graininess of the 16mm film is
most evident. Most often the screen holds two or three side-by-side
simultaneous views of the action filmed from different angles. At other times
one image is in the center with a second view shown in mirror-images on each
side, much as French filmmaker Able Gance did for
segments of his 1927 epic Napoleon.

But besides
its impressive technical and musical aspects, Woodstock is a vivid document of
a period and an attitude. It is not merely a concert film. It depicts a
peaceful crowd of nearly half a million people gathered in one place, enjoying
themselves, not getting into much trouble, and making a generally favorable
impression on the local residents whose lives were disrupted for that weekend.
It shows people coming together to make something happen, then adapting to the
situation and not letting things get out of hand when it becomes much more than
anyone bargained for or even dreamed of.

Woodstock is a film that calls out to be
seen on as large a screen as possible with the sound turned up as loud as the
system will bear. While it runs on for nearly four hours (with an Interf*****gmission near the
two-hour mark), for fans of the music and/or era its easy to lose track of the time.

The BluRay edition, like the theatrical release, is in the
2.4:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio with split-screens letterboxed to 2.66:1, and
the 1.33:1 bonus performances are windowboxed to fit
their full height in the 1.78:1 TV image.

Among the
numerous bonus materials (mostly HD) are an informative 90-minute 2009
retrospective on the film’s genesis and production (making up for the lack of a
commentary track) plus over two hours of musical performances that did not make
it into the final cut of the film. A special collectors’ edition throws in a
bunch of memorabilia reproductions.

WOODSTOCK on BluRay:

Movie
A+ Video A- Audio A Extras A-

YOJIMBO
(1961) and SANJURO
(1962)

The Criterion Collection has long
been noted for releasing high-quality home video editions of interesting and
influential films from around the world, both modern and classic. They’re
slowly but surely adding BluRay titles to their
already impressive and eclectic catalog of DVDs and now long out-of-print
Laserdiscs.

While the long career of
legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is well-represented on DVD from
Criterion, they’ve had only his 1980 epic Kagemusha on BluRay,
and Lionsgate recently released a pretty good BluRay version of Ran,
his 1985 samurai variation on “King Lear.” In March 2010, however, to mark
Kurosawa’s 100th birthday, Criterion came out with one of his most
entertaining and influential films, Yojimbo (1961), both individually and as part of a
double-disc set with its sequel, Sanjuro (1962).

Yojimbo (whose title means The
Bodyguard) stars Japanese superstar and long-time Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro
Mifune as the title character who says his name is Sanjuro (Thirty) but explains he’s really almost forty.
He’s a wandering, out-of-work samurai warrior in the late 1800s who stumbles
into a village torn by violence between two competing families of racketeers.

Naturally, with his cocky
self-confidence, personal code of honor, and supreme skill with his weapon of
choice, he decides he’s just the person to clean up the town. He plays the two
gangs against each other, with plenty of intrigue, action, and violence before
the climactic showdown and satisfying conclusion.

Plot sound familiar? Maybe like
something Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis might do? Or some
old cowboy movie? Kurosawa loved American westerns, and adapted their
formula and some of their style to historical Japan, and American filmmakers
reciprocated the honor. His 1954 film The
Seven Samurai (scheduled for BluRay in late 2010)
was remade as The Magnificent Seven
in 1960 (now on BluRay), and his breakthrough film Rashomon (1950)
was also turned into an American western, The
Outrage (1964).

Yojimbo was so popular that it
was very quickly and very closely remade as a traditional western, but shot in
Spain by Italian director Sergio Leone. As A
Fistful of Dollars (1964, also now on BluRay) it
made an international star of Clint Eastwood. Later action star Bruce Willis
liked the script so much that he remade it as a 1930s American gangster film
under title Last Man Standing in
1996. And it’s not all that far removed from the cathartic vigilante attitude
of the two “Boondock Saints” movies.

Mifune
is at his best in Yojimbo,
and it is easy to see how Eastwood and Willis enjoyed taking his cool, cynical,
wisecracking character and adding their own mannerisms. The often extreme
martial arts violence was a bit shocking in its day, and there’s a memorable
shot of a scraggly dog walking down the dusty street with a human hand in its
mouth. But the brutality and bloody swordplay is tempered by a consistent
darkly comic attitude and some outright comedy bits another trademark adopted
by Eastwood and Willis, and of course the “Boondock Saints” films.
Interestingly, Last Man Standing made
it to BluRay in July of 2010 and Fistful of Dollars came out in June, so you can now do a
high-definition triple-feature comparison.

YOJIMBO on BluRay:

Movie: A+ / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: A-

Sanjuro finds Mifune’s
character coming across a group of brash young samurai worried about internal
power struggles and corruption in their clan. Naturally, our hero points out
the flaws in their analysis of the situation and especially in their plans to
remedy it. They’re not happy with his assessment, but some disastrous incidents
and lucky escapes eventually convince them of his wisdom.

In Sanjuro there is much more talk
and much less action than Yojimbo, with the comedy tending more to dry wit than broad
slapstick. Part of this may be due to criticism of all the violence in the
first film. In fact a couple of characters seem to be comic allusions to this
as they constantly urge against bloodshed and make comments on how beautiful
various flowers are.

At 96 minutes, its about a quarter-hour shorter
than Yojimbo, but may actually seem longer due to the
different approach. Of course Mifune’s pent-up energy
has to be released in a spectacular bloodbath or two
somewhere, but it’s never quite as graphic until the very end this time,
and even then it’s countered by a comment on how the most effective sword
should remain in its sheath.

The meticulously composed
CinemaScope widescreen photography of both films comes across beautifully in
these BluRay editions, a substantial upgrade from
Criterions previous DVD version. The rarely heard original 3-channel Perspecta stereo soundtrack has also been restored for the BluRay of each film, and is included with an option for the
more common mono soundtrack. Both sound good, although there seems to be
occasional muffled distortion in the stereo track at times. Perspecta
was a low-cost optical directional mono simulated alternative to the more
expensive discretely recorded 4-track magnetic stereo.

Both discs also have a generous
selection of bonus features including a scholars commentary track, trailers,
good documentaries on the making of the films (standard-definition,
unfortunately), stills galleries, and illustrated booklets with additional
background.

SANJURO on BluRay:

Movie: B+ / Video: A / Audio: A- / Extras: A-

ZULU
(1964)

Quite a few interesting
films have been released on BluRay only in Europe in
the past couple of years, and luckily some of them are region-free discs that
can be played in US BluRay players. All three of
these came out in 2008 and were recently selling for the equivalent of just $14
each from Amazon.co.uk (not including shipping).

Zulu (1964) is an epic of British colonial power and native
rebellion based on an actual incident that is sort of Britain's version of
"Custer's Last Stand" or The
Alamo, with a few major variations. Despite a relatively low budget, it has
excellent production values, spectacular South African location shooting, and
powerhouse performances. Stanley Baker not only starred in but produced Zulu
with expatriate American director CyEndfield for their own brand-new production company, thanks
to the backing of Joseph E. Levine.

Michael Caine got
his first major role as a young British officer, and Jack Hawkins plays against
type as an alcoholic missionary. Unlike most war films, it manages to be a patriotic,
moving portrait of personal and national heroism at the same time it undercuts
official military policies and makes a powerful anti-war statement. Endfield pulls off a delicate balancing act of making an
exciting war picture that glorifies military discipline and bravery while
vividly dramatizing its tragic devastation and questioning its ultimate value
(and keep it within a PG rating). During the troubled era of the American Civil
Rights movement and the South African Apartheid battles, he also dared to
depict both the dignity and bravery of the Zulu warriors besieging the lonely
British outpost.

For some reason I
don't recall ever having seen this film in its entirety before this, only
excerpts on TV or pan & scan VHS. I had gotten a cheap DVD that at least
was letterboxed, but the picture was so soft I finally gave up on watching the
whole film. The BluRay from Paramount-UK is an
audio-visual revelation, including the original stereo soundtrack and
incredibly crisp widescreen picture (even though the audio quality is not quite
up to modern standards). Unfortunately there is just a little too much digital
noise reduction that keeps most of the detail but completely obliterates the
film grain. In my basement theatre, this was barely noticeable if I sat in the
third or fourth row instead of the first or second, and people two or more
screen-widths away from their screens probably won't notice it.

I'd held off
ordering this disc for some time, fearing its standard-definition bonus
materials would be unplayable on a U.S.-region machine. As it turns out, all
four featurettes and two trailers are in the NTSC
format so they play perfectly, and all are quite informative. There's also a
good audio commentary with a film historian and the film's second unit
director.